Course created in collaboration with the NMSU College of Engineering.

Innovation & Product Development is an eye-opening course that gives you the experience of going through the early stages of turning an idea into a business. You will start with a product idea of your own and iteratively work to develop "product-market fit." As you learn, your initial idea will evolve until you have confidence it can succeed or decide it is necessary to pivot in a new direction.

The methodology used is the Lean LaunchPad. The approach applies the scientific method to developing and testing your hypothesis. You will develop many hypotheses for your idea, test them, and repeat them until you can validate your idea(s). The Lean LaunchPad method is being used at Fortune 500 companies, is taught at leading universities like Stanford and Columbia, and is the foundation for the National Science Foundation's i-Corps program to help researchers commercialize technologies.

This course is an asynchronous online course. The course is broken into five modules. Each module will take approximately 7-10 hours to complete. However, this course is designed to give you the opportunity to pursue your own product, app, or service idea and turn it into a business, which can easily exceed 40 hours/week. This is not the expectation for everyone, but, as they say, you get back what you put into it.

Even if you never become an entrepreneur, consultant, or product developer, this course will help you develop a better understanding of your employer, your role in the company, and how you create value for your customers.