See the current ICT Innovation Course for further information.

This course is offered at the University of Trento in the framework of four tracks offered by Trento within the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT DIgital) Master School programme:

• EIT Digital Cyber Security track, local information on the courses in Trento can be found here, handled by the security group
• EIT Digital Internet Technology and Architecture track,
• EIT Digital Software and Service Architectures track).
• EIT Digital Digital Media Technology track).

This course illustrates the key steps of product design and developement and guide students, forming multi-disciplinary teams, into the development of a “product” as opposed to just a “project”.

We often see nice proof-of-concept research demonstration of useful tools in magazines or on web-sites. What does it take to make this a product? For example, suppose we are building a tool that provides a better interface to a hardware device. On our blog we can say “A brief search on the internet shows us the right data-sheet for the product”. This is not feasible in a product and must be replaced by a web service, that delivers the right results to our own customers.

This course should allow students to experience what it takes to transform an idea into a product.

• Lecturer: Fabio Massacci
• Tutors:
  • Bernardo Villalba Frías (PhD student in Embedded Systems),
  • Dr Jing Nie (PhD in Finance at Durham Business School),
  • Stanislav Dashevskyi (Phd student in Security and Privacy, 1year at SAP AG),
  • Dr Stefano Tranquillini (Phd in Service Design in Trento, CTO and co-founder Chino.io),

This course is normally 6ECTS credits for MSc students enrolled in Trento or for EIT/ICTLabs students joining Trento as exit students. For EIT/ICTLabs master students having Trento as entry students this course will yield 9 credits as it includes the credits for the EIT/ICTLabs summer school.

• Creativity: How to solve problems when not all steps are completely specified (this what you should try to do with your design/architectural result)
• Intellectual Transformation: How to transform an idea into a product (the first “brainstorming” step is your research canvas, the last one is the final product)
• Leadership: Organize yourselves into a team and arrive to make a final product (you should try to leverage on each other’s competences)
• Making value judgement: Decide which parts are important and which are not also on the basis of ethical and social considerations.

• Learning: Lectures on Product Design and Development (PD&D)
  • Introduction
  • Product Specifications
  • Concept (Mostly selection and testing)
  • Product Architecture
  • Prototyping and robust design
  • Patents and Intellectual Property
• Thinking: Concept's Idea Canvas (up to 10/30 grade points)
  • Each team will produce a concept's idea canvas to clarify the key strong points on their product
• Designing: Product design and architecture (up to 10/30 grade points)
  • Teams will produce a detailed architecture and a poster explaining how their product will work
• Producing: Product prototype (up to 15/30 grade points)
  • Each team will have a small budget for hardware/software and will have to actually present a working product

Karl T. Ulrich and Steven D. Eppinger. Product Design and Development. 5th edition, Irwin McGraw-Hill, 2012.

There is also an eBook with a subset of the chapters that is used as a textbook for Karl Ulrich's Product Design on-line Course on Coursera for 30$. You can go to McGraw-Hill on-line shop and then search for Karl Ulrich or ISBN:9781308099064.

The following idea for the product by Michele Dallachiesa from the startup SkySense has been selected for the 2017 course (following up the sheperd drone by Samy Kamkar in 2016).

“A swarming fleet of inexpensive drones can serve multiple purposes, from monitoring crops in agriculture to surveillance of industrial sites, from mapping indoor large industrial facilities to…”

Some details on the idea of swarming drones are available on Ardupilot, as well as some code directly available for planning of a single drone SkySense Planner. See as well the AirSim project. Read them.

April 12 we have been moved to Romm A210

• Wednesday - room A212 - 13:00-15:00
• Friday - room A224 - 9:00-12:00 (up to 13:00 on the Show Room days)