Fusion › Curriculum › EPOM 411
Innovation: the Confluence of Need, Requirements and Creativity
How an idea becomes a validated development concept with commercial potential. This course supplies the tools and the facilitation methods that carry a team across that gap.
- Term
- Summer 2027
- Credits
- 3
- Format
- Online, asynchronous
- Program
- Engineering, Innovation Management & Leadership
- Division
- Engineering Leadership & Professional Practice
- School
- Case School of Engineering
The course
The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the tools and methods of facilitation needed to move from a simple idea to a validated development concept with commercial potential.
Drawing on established programs including Stanford's BioDesign, Lean Launch, and Requirements by Design, the course leads students through the process of developing detailed perspectives on unmet need, validated design requirements, intellectual property analysis, and commercialization fundamentals.
EPOM 411 is offered through the Division of Engineering Leadership and Professional Practice as an elective in the Case School of Engineering's online master's programs, and is delivered entirely online. Lectures and materials are released on a schedule and worked through asynchronously, so students in different time zones take the course over the semester without a fixed meeting time. Students work in teams, and the class itself is virtual.
An idea is a proposed solution. A development concept is a solution attached to a validated need and a set of requirements someone can build against. Most projects fail in the gap between the two, because nobody made the idea specific enough to be tested.
Place in the sequence
EPOM 411 develops the needs-based innovation and design work on which the rest of the concentration builds, and EPOM 413 names it as a foundation. Students who have taken EPOM 410 arrive able to value an invention holistically. This course addresses the front end of that process, where the need is defined and the requirements are set.
The same methodology anchors the first module of the fall core course, RGME 467, where teams construct formal needs statements from a problem, a population, and a measurable outcome.