Experiences from a positivistic way of teaching in the fuzzy front end

This paper presents a project based graduate course in early stage product development called Fuzzy Front End. Based on a brief theory-based perspective and data from student interviews as well as stakeholders we provide a discussion ground for the format of the course. The main goal of the course is to educate confident engineers by providing a complete experience of an early stage product development process with all its positive and negative facets. Our findings indicate that the course provides strong motivational factors, as well as a collaborative mind-set amongst the teams that creates a motivational atmosphere for high quality project-outcomes. This insight is the starting point for highlighting shortcomings of a competition-based course format and discussing a potential alternative.