The module is intended to emphasise the creative aspects of process engineering, and as such contrasts with other modules, which concentrate on numerical and technical skills. It delivers the message that imagination and responsibility are essential attributes for successful professional engineers who are required to interface with many other business sectors.
Working in groups, students use brainstorming techniques to generate ideas for new products and/or processes, while considering ethical, economic, and societal implications of proposed innovations. Each group then filters these ideas and develops one or more to the point of producing a business/development plan for its realisation.
Groups are required to give attention to both commercial and ethical aspects of the project, and the engineering and process technology involved. As well as experiencing group operation in a broad, open-ended ideas generating environment, the students written and oral presentational skills and ethical reasoning capabilities are enhanced and tested.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module the student should be able to:
1. Understand how teams can operate effectively when addressing open-ended tasks requiring creative and entrepreneurial input.
2. Use brainstorming techniques, and refine the output to produce practical ways of developing innovative ideas.
3. Understand the importance of defining target customers, conducting market analysis, and consideration of intellectual property for engineering ventures.
4. Write a business plan, including finance and marketing strategy that can be defended ethically and in terms of health and safety
5. Use engineering skills and ethical reasoning to make a process/product with unique selling points that may be produced in a socially and environmentally beneficial way.
6. Present ideas convincingly by both written and oral means.