Ideas to Innovation Projects

The centerpiece of the ECE project-track MS is an immersive design experience that integrates an ambitious system design project with the development of students’ professional success skills. These end-to-end projects engage teams to work across the spectrum of materials and devices to circuits, systems, software, and reliability. Student teams consist of members with different technical expertise.

The development of students’ success skills is an integral part of the design experience – tightly linked to the design project itself. Skills to be developed include written and oral communication to a variety of audiences, building successful teams, working in teams, leading teams, an appreciation of professional ethics, and the related business knowledge and understanding of intellectual property needed to develop technology demonstrations into start-up companies or new product lines in existing companies.

This experience is designed to prepare students to conceive compelling ideas for project, sell them to management, work in a team to successfully demonstrate proof-of-concept, and then to plan the stage two scale up to a successful small business or product line in a large company. The processes for project proposals, approvals to proceed, design reviews, and final reports are modeled on those of leading technology innovation companies.

Ideas for projects come from ECE faculty or from other sources. For example, several faculty research groups are eager to turn recent research advances into product demonstrations. Similarly, Purdue’s Office of Technology Commercialization is looking for teams to produce proof-of-concept demonstrations of intellectual property in Purdue’s portfolio.