2020
Innovation Project 2020
More than just a normal course (Seline Steffanoni)
As in the previous years, our Mechanical Engineering bachelor students are currently giving proof of their design skills. In the Innovation Project the students work in teams and run through an entire product development process. What starts as a challenge turns into an idea, becomes a solution and finally develops into a fully functioning system.
The Innovation Project is no typical seminar; hence the methods of product development are not conveyed in a typical way either; rather they are implemented hands-on right from the start.
The challenge 2020
As every year, the pd|z team came together to formulate an imaginary story. This year it was a story about the spread of a pandemic but no one could have known the imaginary story would turn into reality. As a consequence, the original Innovation Project 2020 had to be aborted. In order to give the students still the chance to gather first practical experiences in product development, a completely new and virtual concept was designed in the course of two weeks.
With the additional goal, to actively contribute to the stop of COVID-19, the students will have to develop a concept which addresses the slogan “Don’t get infected and don’t spread the virus” which will spread into the world through a social media campaign.
The task of the students is to analyse behaviour in our society and formulate needs from which they can deduct a concept for a campaign. They are free in developing anything from a simple guideline or lifehack to a physical product or web application with the only condition being to follow the rules of social distancing. They will use Instagram as a platform to test aspects of their product and to expand their campaign.
This way, the students have a chance to gain thorough insight into agile product development and experience new development practices supported by technology and social media.
Agile Development and pd|z Principles
The Innovation Project follows the idea of agile development. Integrating elements from scrum and kanban into their work, the teams work in biweekly sprint cycles at the end of which they present their interim-results.
Student colleagues from more advanced semesters coach the Innovation Project participants in their work; for this they are specifically trained in the coaching of design teams. With the help of the pd|z principles for product development, the coaches guide the students through the sprints and iterations of the agile product development process. Behind the Principles as a success factor, lie several carefully selected practices for the advancement of teams in creative development processes, elaborated through research by the pd|z.
The Challenge and Awards
Monday May 11th marks the beginning of the Launch week, where the students officially launch their final campaign on their Instagram accounts.
We kindly invite you to browse through the Instagram accounts of all teams where they give you an insight about the virtual product development and document the transformation of an idea into a project with the potential to save lives. We try to link all project accounts via our own pd|z Zurich Instagram account “pdzethzurich”. You are kindly invited to follow us as well!
The highlight of the project will take place on May 19th and 20th, where the students get the chance to pitch their concept to a group of other teams, coaches, PhD candidates and potentially to public listeners as well. The pitches will take place as several video conferences where the audience will vote for their favourite project.
To give the contestants a challenge there will be several different awards to win, as for example for the best Instagram performance, the most votes after the pitch or another winning concept chosen by the department D-MAVT.