Making it real: Scaling up interdisciplinary design to model real-world engineering entrepreneurship

In all but the largest companies, engineering has always been an inherently interdisciplinary practice: multiple engineering disciplines must collaborate effectively with each other and with other disciplinary experts to deliver products and services to clients. Some institutions, including our own, have responded to this observation by integrating innovative interdisciplinary teaming experiences into their engineering programs. Over a decade of experience shows that such interdisciplinary training is valuable, but that efficacy is limited due the failure to integrate non engineering disciplines. This paper reports on the iCubed project, a pilot effort exploring training in engineering entrepreneurship, in which project and course are modeled on commercial product development. A massively interdisciplinary team design project at the senior and graduate level was developed and executed with a team spanning seven disciplines in engineering, business, and architecture. We report on project planning, design, and outcomes, and offer a set of best practices distilled from this experience.