"The book provides vital insights into commercial development for engineering students in a highly practical and applied manner. Over the past 3 years, application of the book's material has allowed the students to develop their commercial literacy and ambition in the University."
--Steve Orr, Director, Northern Ireland Science Park CONNECT program which looks to accelerate the growth of knowledge-based companies in Northern Ireland Engineering Innovative Products: A Practical Experience is a pioneering book that will be of key use to senior undergraduate and graduate engineering students who are being encouraged to explore innovation and commercialization as part of their courses. The book will teach the essential skills of entrepreneurship and address the fundamental requirements needed to establish a successful technology company.
As well as providing the crucial background and insights enabling students to identify a key market, it also offers a highly practical guide to undertaking genuine product validation and producing a feasibility study, as well as providing vital insights into the challenges and demands in forming a technology based company.
Key features:
- Outlines how to develop and grow an engineering solution which has market potential and covers key business aspects of giving the perfect pitch, sales and marketing, protection of ideas and finance, to offer a complete and practical guide to commercializing ideas.
- Provides vital insight into the design and innovation processes within engineering and the challenges and pitfalls in translating good ideas into great products.
- Features contributions from leading experts in marketing, finance, company formation, sales and intellectual protection which provides details of the challenges faced by innovators when commercializing ideas.
- Includes Ccase studies from engineering students who give insights into how they have successfully developed their own ideas into companies.
About the Author: Roger Woods, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast, UK
Roger Woods is a Professor of Digital Systems at Queen's University Belfast. He is a Fellow of the IET, a senior member of IEEE and a fully chartered engineer. He has published over 160 scientific papers and holds a number of patents. He has collaborated extensively with industry and has founded a spin-off company Analytics Engines to commercialise this research. He has developed the 'Industrial Project' course at QUB on which this book is based.
Karen Rafferty, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast, UK
Dr. Karen Rafferty is a senior lecturer in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast. She researches into computer vision with associated camera calibration, position estimation, feature extraction and tracking, colour recognition and sensor fusion with application to the development of intelligent autonomous industrial and environmental inspection devices with a particular emphasis on lighting. She has developed a number of innovative teaching and assessment strategies for Higher Level Engineering.
Julian Murphy, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast, UK
Dr. Julian Murphy is a lecturer in the School of Electronics, Electrical engineering and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast. He researches into novel microelectronics solutions form a range of security applications and has had experience of forming companies.
Paul Hermon, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Queen's University Belfast, UK
Mr. Hermon is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Queen's University Belfast. He is Programme Director of the Product Design and Development (PDD) degrees offered in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at QUB. The PDD degrees were introduced in 2004 and developed in line with the syllabus and standards defined by the CDIO Initiative (est. 2000) is an international collaboration of universities aiming to improve the education of engineering students. The CDIO ethos is that students are taught in the context of conceiving, designing, implementing and operating a product or system. Fundamental to this is an integrated curriculum with multiple Design-Build-Test (DBT) experiences at the core. (QUB) was the first UK University to join the CDIO initiative.
