The main goal of this course, addressed to students from all MS Programs, is to expose student to projects emphasizing information technology but also requiring interdisciplinary (horizontal) skills, needed to work in a truly multidisciplinary environment, which characterizes the current industry trends.  This goal is fulfilled through multi-disciplinary projects, which are conducted throughout the semester by teams of students with different backgrounds and skills. The project emphasizes requirements specification, design and feasibility analysis of the envisioned solution, and implementation of a proof of concept show-casing the most innovative part and feasibility of the solution.

Cutting edge technologies and results of the most recent Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB) research work will be considered as a baseline.  Each project is mentored by a team of tutors, with different backgrounds; one of them should belong to the Computer Engineering Area of the DEIB. Examples of projects developed in recent years range from self-driving cars, novel mobile apps, sensing smart cities, indoor localization applications for airports, artificial intelligence applications for space systems, and big data analytics and machine learning for healthcare.

A selected set of online lectures will support students in the development of critical horizontal skills, in the topics of design thinking, design methods, decision making, innovation management, and economic evaluation from concept development to a startup creation. Specific emphasis will be given to a set of lectures on principles of design thinking and collaborative problem solving.  Winning companies, such as Apple, Google, Tesla and others, innovate continuously because of their culture of design thinking, the ability to integrating the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the requirements for business success. Students will participate to small team-based concept development, considering case studies and innovative scenarios problem settings.

At the end of this course, students will learn to:

·      Understand the design thinking process

·      Generate and evaluate new product and service concepts

·      Design services and customer experiences

·      Evaluate product development economics

More in details the table below summarizes the expected skills students will develop

The first lecture will be dedicated to providing an overview of the course content, and to the presentation of projects proposals. Projects will be developed by groups of up to five students. Project selection will be performed by students, who will indicate their preferences after project presentations. Matching will attempt to satisfy the majority of students while, at the same time, allocating students to the majority of projects and satisfying projects disciplinary pre-requisites. A follow-up meeting can be arranged if necessary.

The projects will be monitored through three follow-up and feedback sessions, focused on concept selection and requirements analysis, software design with emphasis on innovative aspects, and prototype presentation with a short pitch of the idea including a business plan.

Lectures on interdisciplinary aspects will be provided online through Coursera and the dedicated Politecnico YouTube channel. These latter lectures are a subset of the Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP) Courses on interdisciplinary issues, methods and models of innovation provided by the ASP program and are based on seminars given by prominent international professors from Universities all over the world (including Stanford, MIT and Berkeley).

The students then will be asked to discuss in a critical way and provide their personal interpretation of the on-line lecture contents. The discussion will be lead alternatively by different groups of students and the leadership and participation to the discussion will be part of the final evaluation.  On-line lectures lessons learned will be also summarized in short papers.

Week 1

• Lecture 1: Course objectives and introduction, Project proposals presentation and assignment

Week 2-4 (online):

• Independent vision and study on “Design methods”

Week 4

• Design methods and requirements (open participation for tutors)
• Discussion and short paper on “Design methods”.Which approach best fit your project needs?

Week 5-8 (online)

• Independent vision and study on “Innovation management”

Week 8

• Concept selection, and user interaction (open participation for tutors)
• Discussion and short paper on “Innovation management”How is your project innovative and which is your unique value proposition?

Week 8-12 (online)

• Independent vision and study on “Decision making”

Week 12

• Final presentation: Project Pitch and software implementation (open participation for tutors)
• Discussion and short paper on “Decision making”How do you expect to be successful and face challenges of other market competitors?

No major prerequisites are required; competence in software programming and requirements analyses are useful in project development.

Project evaluation occurs at several presentations and concerns well-defined aspects at each presentation.  The final grade for the individual students will be obtained according to the following criteria:

• Short papers (20%)
• Presentation skills as assessed during design approach and requirements, concept selection, and user interaction and pitch presentations (10%)
• First and second project presentations – focus on method (15%)
• Final project presentation – focus on result (20%)
• Prototype (35%)