A Graduate Curriculum for Engineering Leadership

The increasing global competition in technology industries puts a premium on those exceptional engineering leaders who can direct multidisciplinary teams to bring innovative technic al ideas to the market in a short period of time meeti ng all cost goals. An educational program that would accelerate the development of such engineering leaders would be of great educational and societal value. We describe a new educational initiative, the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program, enabled by a gift from the Gordon Foundation. The curriculum of the program features a thesis-scale "Challenge Project" based o n the academic advisor/dissertation model, but directed t oward commercialization or deployment of a new technology. The Challenge Project will be supported by new courses in "Engineering Leadership" and "Scientific Foundations of Engineering" to give the graduate a broad scient ific framework to support rapid "back-of-the-envelope" quantitative assessment of technology problems, an understanding of the non-technical issues of commercialization, and a successful experience of l eading the development of a product in a time-critical environment.