A new enterprise at Tulane is matching engineering ingenuity with entrepreneurial savvy to produce designs with real-world market appeal. Michael Larson, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is spearheading the creation of a product-design studio to serve as an incubator for students learning how to bring design concepts to market.

The studio's first project, developed by Larson and two of his graduate students, Luke Hooper and Del Segura, is a board game called "Deflexion." The game has simple rules and is easy to learn, but what sets it apart is a high-tech twist. Two players move game pieces around a board divided into squares. Some pieces have mirrors and some do not. Bounding the board is a raised frame into which are built two low-power lasers, one for each player. The game pieces include a "pharaoh," obelisks and pyramids with mirrors. After each move, a player must press the button on his/her laser. The beam bounces from mirror to mirror around the playing field. The challenge is to protect one's own pharaoh while maneuvering to "light up" the opposing player's pharaoh.

During his 12 years at Tulane, Larson has taught a number of undergraduate and graduate product-design courses. The design studio taking shape in Tulane's engineering laboratory complex is an outgrowth of Larson's work with a graduate student who had a strong interest in design.

As one of his graduate projects, the student worked with Larson to invent a crawfish-peeling machine. "Because of that," says Larson, "it became evident to me more than ever that there are a lot of students who want to get creative and give birth to new ideas."

Larson knew that students would need a course to prepare them to make their ideas commercially viable. Entrepreneurship programs, he noted, are generally found in business schools, teaching business students how to take ideas to market.

"In engineering schools, on the other hand, you find people who are in love with a particular technology, but are not equipped to take that into the marketplace," says Lawson. "I thought it would be nice to have an entrepreneurial program for our engineering students."

With student help, Larson is renovating a former lab in the engineering complex, creating a space that is conducive to brainstorming and collaborative innovation.

The studio-based course goes significantly beyond other courses Larson has taught. "I designed the course to see if we could pick one thing to design, and then take it to market," says Larson. "For this first project, I decided on toys, since every student has had some experience with toys."

During the past year, Larson and his students formalized the game's design and built a prototype. They created the plastic game pieces using the studio's rapid prototyping machine, which builds three-dimensional forms out of molten plastic. The students even designed sales packaging for the game.

The team's next step was to try to get someone interested in buying the idea.

Looking for companies that might be interested in licensing the game, Larson contacted Hasbro, a nationally prominent toy manufacturer. "Hasbro had an interest in the game," says Larson, "but they were more intrigued by the whole design-studio idea."

With a $12,680 grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, the team commissioned 500 copies of the game. With several dozen of these in hand, the inventors are taking the game to the American International Toy Fair in New York on Feb. 20ý23.

"We hope the game will meet with a positive reaction there," says Larson.

Larson and his students also have been invited to exhibit their game at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance annual "March Madness of the Mind" exhibit in San Diego on March 16.

Larson is optimistic about the design studio's prospects, and wants to enhance the collaborative experience by including students from other disciplines across campus. He has already talked to faculty members from the business and law schools about how to familiarize engineering students with concepts concerning entrepreneur development, patent, copyright and trademark law.

"Ideally, one day we would like to emulate product-design firms even to the point of having students from sociology or graphic design working alongside the engineers on these projects."