Submit Project Idea Requests
Project submission requests are accepted on a continual basis pending available resources.
What makes a successful Next-Gen project?
Ideal projects comprise the design and prototype of products, processes, software, or services involving technical analysis, financial justification, and implementation prototyping. Projects provide an excellent opportunity with minimal donated investment to investigate potential applications targeting competitive advantage. Projects should have a strong design component with clear, well-defined objectives to provide the faculty supervised, student team with an initial starting point and focused project completion objectives with associated deliverables. Typical project scope targets a team of 4-6 students with a typically 15-week project timeline.
Sponsors support projects with in-kind or monetary donations depending on requested project scope. Some projects may incur additional donations based on sponsor needs for Intellectual Property & Confidentiality. Read more about sponsorship. Once a team has been formed and starts working on a project, part of any monetary donation can be submitted as a tax-deductible contribution to Penn State Brandywine depending on value associated with project deliverables.
Sponsor involvement is essential to the success of Next-Gen Lab projects. Sponsors are expected to identify a liaison to serve as the project team point-of-contact. Penn State Brandywine relies on our sponsors to fully engage their project teams, specifically the faculty supervisor. As with most projects, the more time sponsors invest in the project, the more they get out of it.
The sponsor liaison should plan on:
- attending the Project Kick-Off Meeting
- providing additional details beyond the one-page Project Description
- facilitating visits from the project team, if necessary
- interacting regularly with the team via tele- or video-conferences, and weekly status reports
- reviewing reports and providing feedback from an industry perspective
Project Deliverables
Depending on the nature of the project, deliverables may include any or all of the following:
- Technical reports (concept, preliminary, detail)
- Feasibility studies, engineering analyses
- Competitive benchmarking
- Engineering drawings and specifications
- Prototypes
- Computer programs, simulation models, data
- Manufacturing or service delivery process plans
- Presentations, animations, videos, demonstrations
- Final technical report, poster, and one-page summary
Each typical 15-week project involving 4-6 student team equates to approximately 400 person hours of effort devoted to the project since students are also taking courses simultaneously. Results from student teams are highly dependent on the type and scope of the project, the innate team capabilities, the amount of client interaction and support, and many other variables. Thus, no project result guarantees can be made, other than faculty supervisor and students best effort. Sometimes a project provides direct and immediate benefits to the sponsor. Another common outcome is a good concept requiring further work either by a follow-on project or directly by the sponsor.