Attitudes Toward Failure in Capstone Design Projects

While working in industry during the 1980s and 1990s, project failures were to be avoided at all costs. For engineers in the medical device industry, these failures could be in the form of: 1) an idea for a new product or feature that eventually failed due to technical infeasibility, regulatory hurdles, lack of market interest, or difficulty in manufacturing; 2) a prototype that did not function as required; or 3) an animal or human clinical study that yielded poor results. They typically resulted in significant project delays, wasted time and money, and lost revenues, and often led to lower raises, fewer promotion opportunities, and damaged reputations

Entrepreneurship in Capstone Design: Has the Pendulum Swung Too Far?

The author supports entrepreneurial education for all interested students, but not at the expense of design education. He thinks we should develop business literacy among all of our students to prepare them for work in start-ups and established medical device companies, and provide opportunities for interested students to add entrepreneurial literacy to better prepare them to create new companies, either upon graduation or later in their careers. Capstone design courses should focus on helping students develop solid design skills and providing opportunities to apply the analytical tools learned in previous courses. Students should be encouraged, not required, to consider commercializing the results of their capstone projects, and interested students should be provided with support for doing so

Will the Real Designer Please Stand Up? [Senior Design]

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a popular television show called To Tell the Truth, on which three contestants claimed to be a person with an unusual occupation or distinction. Two of them were impostors, and the other was telling the truth. Four panelists asked the contestants questions to determine who was being truthful. After each panelist chose the contestant he or she thought was telling the truth, the host would ask Will the real _____ please stand up? To create drama, each contestant would rise at different times and then sit, leaving the contestant with the unusual occupation or distinction standing

Analytical development work on bis- /phenoxyphenyl/ ethers, mix 4P3E

Gas chromatography and infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy procedures for characterizing bis phenoxyphenyl ether

Is the Experimental Auction a Dynamic Market?

Experimental auctions are generally thought of as static markets. This paper presents the results of an experimental auction designed to test whether participants’ perceptions regarding the relative difficulty of delaying or reversing a transaction outside of the experimental market systematically affect their willingness-to-pay bids. The results show that auction participants’ perceptions significantly impact their bids in a manner that is consistent with real option theory. These results suggest that economists must be careful to consider the existence of outside markets when designing experimental auctions.experimental auctions, dynamic markets, real option theory, commitment cost

The Pollution Game: A Classroom Exercise Demonstrating the Relative Effectiveness of Emissions Taxes and Tradable Permits

This classroom exercise illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of various regulatory frameworks aimed at internalizing negative externalities from pollution. Specifically, the exercise divides students into three groups—the government regulatory agency and two polluting firms—and allows them to work through a system of uniform command-and-control regulation, a tradable emissions permit framework, and an emissions tax. Students have the opportunity to observe how flexible, market-oriented regulatory frameworks can outperform inflexible command-and-control. More importantly given the ongoing debate about how best to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, students can also observe how the introduction of abatement-cost uncertainty can cause one market-oriented solution to outperform another.classroom experiments, emissions taxes, pollution, tradable emissions permits