Engineering Management Skills: The Missing Link For Technical Graduates

Dickson, Brian

doi:10.18260/1-2--3540

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“…Ollis 6 described the multidisciplinary design course that had been established at six of the institutions in the SUCCEED coalition. Dickinson reported that an appreciation of interdisciplinary approaches is perhaps the skill most deficient in our engineering graduates 7 . True entrepreneurism with regards to technology also ofcourse embodies identification of a societal or business need for novel new products as well as the discovery and development and side that is driven by technical creativity and persistence in research 8 .…”

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confidence: 99%

A New Interdisciplinary Course for Engineering and Business Students: The Global Pharmaceutical Industry

Kelly

2011 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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The workplace today is changing. Technological breakthroughs often cross disciplines countries and continents. In highly regulated industries such as the pharmaceutical business, it is essential for engineers designing the products and processes to be aware of the different regulatory legal guidelines worldwide and the technical and cultural challenges associated with relocating manufacturing and research facilities from the United States to countries such as Singapore, India and Ireland. A new interdisciplinary course was developed and taught for the first time this past 2009/10 academic year at Villanova University called "the Global Pharmaceutical Industry". The goal of this course was to provide an opportunity for engineering (primarily chemical engineering), science and business students to interact while gaining exposure to some of the key technical and non-technical issues driving the evolution and operation of the global pharmaceutical industry. The course included lectures and presentations by Villanova Engineering and Business faculty, as well as industry experts. The technical (molecules, process and equipment) and business (pharmaceutical economics, marketing and management basics were covered by Villanova engineering and business faculty respectively. Experts from the industry discussed current and complex issues facing the industry such as; drug manufacturing and marketing regulations in China, ethics and logistics of clinical trials in India and drug anticounterfeiting efforts. The pedagogical approach included lecture, discussion, case analysis, and industry focused projects.The purpose of this paper is to describe the benefits and challenges associated with this new course at Villanova. Two noteworthy and somewhat unexpected benefits of the course were the engineering students gaining an appreciation for how they can apply their problem solving abilities to some of the less technical problem but quite complex questions facing the industry (i.e. where to conduct clinical trials for a new drug) and the two faculty who co-taught the course getting an energizing experience as a result of exposure to new material and teaching styles. Some of the challenges included: achieving an interesting and fair mixture of technical and non-technical material in the lectures, exams and group projects; achieving connectivity between the wide range of topics in the course and achieving a fair mixture of exam, homework and group project questions that allowed for the business students to utilize their abilities to make convincing written and verbal arguments and the engineers to utilize their abilities to be quantitative and problem solve. The course was received very favorably by the students as indicated by surveys and deemed quite unique and valuable by the many industry experts that voluntarily participated in the course. In summary, this course was successful in a difficult and uncommon task of delivering material from technical (science and engineering) and nontechnical (business) disciplines to a diverse group...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Interdisciplinary Course for Engineering and Business Students: The Global Pharmaceutical Industry

Kelly

2011 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Engineering Management Skills: The Missing Link For Technical Graduates

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

A New Interdisciplinary Course for Engineering and Business Students: The Global Pharmaceutical Industry

A New Interdisciplinary Course for Engineering and Business Students: The Global Pharmaceutical Industry

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