Center Activities

 General

The basic and central intent of the Center is to design new products, systems or processes of which are of commercial value, locally and worldwide.  Some of these projects may in fact be proposed and funded by companies who have identified a particular need for a new or improved product, process or system.  In other cases projects may be proposed by faculty members whose research activities have suggested or inspired products, systems or processes suggested by results and insights obtained from that research.  In other instances, the creative talents of students may be the basis for the design, evaluation, and development of completely new devices or systems.  In fact, the unleashing of the creative minds of students, whether college seniors, high school students, or even elementary school students, is perhaps the most exciting and worthwhile element of the Center. 

In brief, the activities of the Center are limited in scope and nature only by the imagination of the students and professors generating and conceiving new designs and approaches to products, systems and processes.  Funding, certainly, is always a reality that must be addressed by any entrepreneur in order to successfully launch a new business.  That reality, however, is a key element of the entrepreneurial education and exposure graduate students are expected to receive and participate in as part of the activities of his Center.    

Origin of Design Projects

As indicated earlier, the renewable basis for the Center’s activities will be the senior capstone design courses from each of the departments of the College of Engineering, which have been subjected to similar financial constraints for many years.  Yet, past experiences have also indicated that an enormous amount of creative energy can be applied to innovative design projects, with little or minimal financial support in some cases, or in other cases, with small levels of support from area companies.   This activity will continue. 

One source of projects may come from individual faculty members submitting proposals to local, state or national agencies or institutions that may require both research and development in which student design teams may be advantageously used.  And finally, interdisciplinary projects of broad scope may be led by a team of faculty members who have obtained funding for such projects.   With the establishment of the Center, however, additional departments, colleges, students, and faculty could participate in design/innovation activities of the Center.  Therefore, a larger variety of potential projects could be proposed and made available to be addressed by multidisciplinary design teams operating under the umbrella of the Center. 

Regardless of the source of the projects it is anticipated that as the Center generates improved products/systems which result in substantial cost savings or increased product sales for companies, more and more requests for additional design projects will be forthcoming from industries – accompanied by funds required to conduct such design studies.   It should be noted that some of the design/innovation projects that have been undertaken by student design teams in the Mechanical Engineering Department in previous years have resulted in company savings from $10,000 to more than $100,000 annually.  Savings resulting from product redesign, in some cases have lead to a new product line, capable of generating entirely new or greatly increased income streams for some companies on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  
 
Some design projects may well be international in character, involving team members from students both from CSU and universities abroad, as has been selected design projects being currently conducted in the Mechanical Engineering Department.  (In another case, such a program has been funded by NSF of precisely this nature, where student teams from Worcester Polytechnic University and a technical university in Wuhan, China travel to each campus in alternate years during the summer, to work on mutually agreed upon design projects.)  Part of the responsibilities of the Center director will be to establish such cooperative programs and seek funding for them from governmental agencies. SU campus.