Engineering product design education with a mixed design-thinking & lean start-up approach

Abstract

In the past 20 years, companies have successfully grown from start-ups to transnational companies are requiring new hard and soft skills from their employees, as they are using new methodologies in order to develop better products and services. Meanwhile, engineering students usually struggle to find projects in which they can apply their knowledge, solve a real market need, and remain financially self-sustainable. Thus, engineering education requires to constantly adapt its curricula. The article presents a project based learning strategy to develop technologically based products, using engineering, design and business tools, using principles from Design Thinking (DT) and Lean Start-up (LS) as a liaison between those domains. The approach was tested during 2 capstone courses for mechatronic engineers at Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Estado de México for 4 years, where the students were required to develop a prototype along with a comprehensive business plan. Through a comparison with external evaluations, we validate the learning experience of merging engineering and Product Design (PD) education with topics from other domains to help leverage the students’ skillset for their future jobs.