Product design education in mechanical and management engineering masters degree programmes. analogies and differences

Mechanical and Management Engineering are some of the stakeholders involved in product development, with different competencies. They must share the responsibility for best solution identification to accordingly answer the customer needs and to authorize the production of products that can have success with a positive economic return. Higher education curricula should prepare such professionals, and this is the reason because courses of product design are proposed to such classes. Even the programmes of the corresponding courses are necessarily different the part related to concept generation is similar. The work aims is to identify analogies and differences between the classes of Mechanical Engineering and Management Engineering, both in the way of leading the generation of concepts and in how the concepts generated have eventually reached the goals of innovation. BrainWriting is a method that can allow students to be productive in concept generation and is based on the two steps of sketching and gallery. This ability must be conjointly employed with the functional study of the problem to be solved. These aspects must be learned by students to avoid fixation, the inconvenience to repeat indefinitely only what is already known. The design alternatives generated by teams of students will be assessed by teachers and experts in the field, following the method proposed by Shah. After such classification, further comparison between the two classes will be done to identify the aspects of the cultural imprinting of such future professionals.