Boston

April 2001

The second business trip for Class II consisted of company visits to Genuity and Product Genesis, research briefings by MIT faculty on relevant projects at the Center for Innovation in Product Development, and participation in the Management Roundtable's Product and Process Leadership conference in Cambridge. At Genuity, students were briefed on the IP telecom industry by the Principal Engineer, Product Manager, and Services Business Manager for voice-over-IP products. At Product Genesis, a small contract design and development house that spun-out from the MIT Innovation Center, a Senior VP and Director of Business Development conducted a tour and provided insights into PGI's highly successful approach to contract product development. An important part of the MPD program is exposure to state-of-the-art research, and the spring timing of the trip coincided nicely with students' efforts to define topics for their Capstone Research Projects. Several MIT faculty, including Steve Eppinger, Dave Wallace, and Nelson Repenning, described relevant research projects within the Center for Innovation in Product Development. During the Product and Process Leadership conference, students heard from a number of interesting speakers, including Robert Kaplan ("Balanced Scorecard"), Adrian Slywotzky ("How Digital is Your business"), Frank Hauck (EMC Corp.), and an extensive series of speakers on several dimensions of leadership. One of last year's RIT Capstone projects, "Strategic Sourcing of Product Development Services - A Decision Making Framework" was presented by Neil Dempsey of Xerox. We also held a dinner with students enrolled in our PD21 sister program at MIT, as we've done before at the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Detroit Mercy, to build a broader network of graduates who share a common perspective on systems-oriented product development.