Abstract
The literature on the management of innovation has strongly emphasised the need for a complex and wide set of competences to successfully manage technological innovation within companies. This paper provides eight years of experience teaching industrial engineers how to integrate technical and non-technical skills in the management of technological innovation. The paper presents the experience of a design based learning course for industrial engineers concerning the New Product Development (NPD) process. The course has been offered to around 400 master students. As an initial result, the paper proposes a model for designing courses on innovation and new product development, useful for engineering schools. In addition, our study suggests that design based learning (DBL) seems to be effective for developing the ability to integrate technical engineering and non-engineering skills, and for developing professional "soft" skills, as well. The DBL approach seems to be less effective for supporting the specialisation of technical competences.
