IBE Curriculum

The Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) Honors Program has a challenging four-year curriculum designed to help prepare the next generation of professional leaders to communicate across business and technical domains with an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving.

IBE Cohort Courses

• Semester I: ENGR 1281.01H – IBE Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors I
• Semester II: ENGR 1282.04H – IBE Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors II
• Semester III: BUSMHR 2400 – IBE Competitive Analysis Seminar
• Semester V: BUSMHR 3400 – IBE Innovation Management Seminar
• Semester VII: ENGR 5901.02H – IBE Capstone I
• Semester VIII: ENGR 5902.02H – IBE Capstone II

Freshmen Cornerstone Project

The IBE Freshman Cornerstone course replaces the traditional freshman design-build-test project with one closely mirroring that of a senior capstone design project. Students work in teams to create a physical product and company. The course culminates with a business plan pitch to seasoned industry representatives. This experience builds a solid foundation for the senior capstone design project.

Sophomore Competitive Analysis Seminar

Students transition from their first-year design project into their first of two IBE management seminars. The sophomore seminar helps students better understand how design decisions affect a firm’s ability to build and sustain a competitive advantage. The course exposes students to tools that help them identify relevant information embedded in massive amounts of publicly available data, assess the relationships among key variables highlighted by management theory, and interpret those relationships to develop educated opinions regarding the viability of a firm’s strategy in a specific context. Class discussions encourage students to communicate their business reasoning and judgments in a group setting.

Junior Technology and Strategy Innovation Seminar

The junior IBE seminar provides students with a strategic perspective on management in complex, knowledge-intensive and dynamic environments. These settings pose a different set of challenges to the identification and pursuit of competitive advantage than described in the sophomore seminar. Although tradeoffs between different resource allocation policies and organizational forms remain critical, the emphasis shifts to whether and when a firm should adapt new sources of advantage. These distinctions often require new tools to consider:

(a) How to evaluate highly uncertain investment proposals.
(b) How to capture value from intangible assets.
(c) How to design organizations that are able to assemble and organize the resources necessary to exploit existing advantages or explore new opportunities.

As with the first IBE management seminar, frequent class discussions elevate student collaboration and critical thinking.