“Proceedings of the 2002 ASEE/SEFI/TUB colloquim Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education” An Innovative Product Design and Development Course at Bilkent University S. Aktürk, A. Atalar, K. Aydogan, M. Baray, H. B. Özgüç, A.B. Özgüler, T. Reyhan, E. Yeldan Bilkent University Abstract A new multidisciplinary design and entrepreneurship course is being offered at Bilkent University. The course entitled “Innovative Product Design and Development I-II” is open to senior students of six different departments. It is a two-semester course that brings together students from Departments of Computer Engineering, Economics, Electrical Engineering, Graphic Design, Industrial Engineering, and Management. A team of six professors, one from each department, coordinates and advises the students. The aim of the course is to provide students an experience of founding and maintaining a high-tech start-up company. The course encompasses the following stages. The students form teams of five or six, one from each department, and compose a project pre-proposal . After receiving the initial approval of the course advisors for technical and financial feasibility of the project, a team establishes the identity of a company which has a name, a logo, and maintains a web page of its own under the course web page. Each firm prepares and submits a business plan with the objective of finding a virtual venture capital for its idea and its future end-product. The venture capitalists are the course advisors. Upon receiving venture capital for its idea, the company completes a prototype end-product by the end of the first semester. At this stage, the company offers its shares to the public whose investors are the faculty members of the six departments involved. In the second semester, the company advertises its product by various means and develops its product into a marketable one by considering economic, ergonomic, short and long-term safety, and environmental factors. The students are graded according to the performance of their team as well as their individual contributions. Introduction The engineering faculty at University has observed that the future engineers are going to work in multidisciplinary teams and have to be innovative if they want to be successful in their careers. Some multidisciplinary design courses offered in different universities were studied 1 . Some of these courses have participants from different engineering departments. 2,4 While some others include students from engineering and other disciplines like management. There are even design courses which are multidisciplinary and multinational 3 . It was also observed that in many universities in USA there are courses to promote entrepreneurship. It was decided that a combination of the multidisciplinary design and entrepreneurship in a course would prepare the students for the real world. Faculty of Engineering at Bilkent University has three engineering departments: Computer Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and Industrial Engineering