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Session Description

Free ticketed event
The textbook for the course, The Early Phases of Technological Innovation for Engineering and Business Students by Paul Swamidass (Aug 14, 2012), is available from Amazon.com.
Technological innovation is what brings products packed with engineering to the market; examples are iPhone, Square, solar cells, wind turbines, and thousands of other products and improvements to products.
The book introduces the principle of the Seven Phases of technological innovation, which makes teaching and learning technology innovation much easier for engineers. Further, this book is geared to enable engineering faculty to teach technological innovation to engineering students in one or two semesters. Workshop covers a range of topics from the product idea, to product development, finally to a finished business plan. The business plan is a blueprint for execution. It can be used for raising investment capital, or finding partners and entrepreneurs to take the technology to the market.
The author is a mechanical engineer with seven years of industrial experience and graduate degrees in management. He directs a custom-developed program on technological innovation for engineering and business students. He has taught a successful course on technological innovation for engineering and business students for twelve years. The book captures twelve years of his experience teaching this practical course to engineering students. It is written for students and teachers and hence its title. Over 500 students have taken the course and validated the content included in the book. It covers topics including innovation, patenting, customer input for product development, market research, break-even analysis, manufacturing, projected cash flow, and business plan preparation. Cases and samples cover patents, patent applications, an award-winning business plan, and lessons from Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Apple and other companies.

Speaker

1. Dr. Paul M. Swamidass

   Auburn University

   Dr. Paul Swamidass is a professor in the College of Business, and Director of the Thomas Walter Center for Technology Management at the Ginn College of Engineering, Auburn University. He is also the Director of the Technological Innovation minor called the Business-Engineering-Technology Program at the University. He is a mechanical engineer, who, after working seven years as an engineer/manager with a large manufacturer, earned his Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

   He is an active inventor. As a pro-se inventor-applicant he was issued a US patent in 2009.

   He is part of an active local angel investors club that carefully investigated and invested in at least five high-tech startups during 2011-12.

   He was a Board member of a startup in Delaware based on an Auburn University chemical-engineering invention, when it raised nearly $3 million in private equity in the first round in 2008.

   He enabled his students to start and establish the “Auburn Student Inventors and Entrepreneurs Club” in 2010 with the goal of giving an early start to potential innovators among students. The first two presidents of the Club have filed multiple patents as pro se applicants before or at graduation.

   He has published books, an encyclopedia, and numerous scholarly papers during his academic teaching and research career spanning nearly three decades.