Taubman College, Ross Business School Faculty Awarded UM’s Provost’s 2009 Teaching Prize for the Integrative Product Development

Professors Shaun Jackson of Taubman College and the School of Art and Design and Bill Lovejoy of the Ross School of Business and the School of Art and Design have won the Provost’s 2009 Teaching Innovation Prize. The prize recognizes their outstanding work in team teaching the Integrative Product Development course offered by UM’s Tauber Institute for Global Operations. Their course serves as a model for interdisciplinary teaching and demonstrates the strength of bringing together different kinds of expertise. For the duration of the semester, student teams from each of the three areas of the University collaborate to research, design, manufacture, price, and market a prototype of a fully functional, customer-ready product. At the end of the course IPD teams pit their products against one another in an online and campus trade show. Consumers vote on the viability and practicality of each product and campaign. As one of the only courses of its kind, IPD has been featured on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and The New York Times.