TRANSCRIPT
Robert D. Howe: The MS/MBA program is a dual degree program. So in two years, you'll earn an MBA from Harvard's Business School and a Master of Science in engineering from Harvard's Engineering School. The core of the curriculum is a set of five classes open only to students in this program, which go through the design fundamentals and the process of launching a new high-tech venture. And it covers the whole process from the initial need discovery process, through developing the idea, fleshing out the product and the business model, to actually pitching to venture capitalists and getting feedback. When you finish the program, you're in a great position to go out and immediately launch a new tech venture.
Roberto Verganti: I mean, our focus is especially on how you frame a problem. If an organization is about creating value, then we actually design this all about how do you create that value, how do you make things that are meaningful. So it's important to start from how you create value. Then you can focus on how you capture it, how you're transforming it and then profitability. But the first thing is that you need to make things that make sense.
Elizabeth Christoforetti: The world doesn't show up with a problem and you just solve it. The students who come in the MS/MBA students that we have in this course, they're creative people who have this latent capacity to imagine things, re-imagining a future that is better than the one we have right now.
Conor Walsh: We try and give students an idea of the early-stage product development process. So how do they go from an idea to creating a prototype and then be able to demonstrate that in some way. They're getting lots of exposure to mechanical engineering, prototyping, embedded systems, electrical engineering prototyping, even a little bit of software and algorithm development. So eventually, when they go to launch their own venture or run their own team, they have an awareness of all the different parts that go into that.
Tom Eisenmann: Of course, you also learn in the program a lot about business, right? You take the entire required curriculum the first year of the MBA, plus electives in the second year. We've designed the five core courses to work in a sequence. So they build on each other.
Students can follow the same concept all the way through. We have people who get an idea early on in the program for a venture, usually their own startup, and they keep working on it and moving it forward and forward and forward. Many of our students have actually launched the ventures they've been working on after graduation. And it's pretty amazing.
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