From classroom to showroom : developing a classroom alpha prototype into a marketable product by Ming Leong [and] Geoffrey T. Tsai.

[摘要] What do you get when you take one professor, two instructors, four mentors, seventeen mechanical engineers and $6,500? One coffee table! Well, at least in our case. During the fall of 2008, our team of senior mechanical engineers enrolled in MIT;;s capstone design course, 2.009 The Product Engineering Process, designed and prototyped a high-end, spiral-folding coffee table named Elika, a product borne out of months of idea generation, brainstorming, market research, machining, testing, troubleshooting, and re-machining. Perhaps our judgment was muddled by the high we got after the final presentation, or maybe we finally realized that we were in fact workaholics, but a group of us decided we couldn;;t stop working on the table and needed to start a company to bring it to market. This is the story of how we went from a bunch of students trying to fulfill a graduation requirement, to a team of founders of a design company. Along the way, we;;ve learned about patents, business, and manufacturing options; we;;ve explored engineering, industrial, and graphic design; we;;ve anticipated our market niche and how to capture it. But through it all, and despite the set-backs, low points, and YouTube-ing, we;;ve had a blast diving into the unknown to chase after an idea we developed together. We hope this document can be a guide and source of comfort to those who hope to do the same.

[发布机构] Massachusetts Institute of Technology