The Enterprise Program is pleased to announce four new Enterprise Teams beginning in the fall, 2004:

• Entrepreneurial Enterprise
  
• Husky Game Development Enterprise
  
• International Business Ventures Engineering Enterprise
  
• Nanotechnology Enterprise

Entrepreneurial Enterprise

The Entrepreneurial Enterprise will be a company run by MTU students with faculty and staff as mentors. Students in their sophomore through senior years from all disciplines will work in the Entrepreneurial Enterprise to identify promising applications of specific technologies, research the market potential for those applications, perform developmental work to enhance those technologies for particular applications, and develop plans for commercialization. The technologies used will include both “on the shelf� technologies owned by MTU, and technologies developed by the students themselves. Teams of students with different blends of skills and problem-solving approaches will be formed. Learning objectives include developing the ability to think creatively, to work effectively in a multi-disciplinary group, to perform a search for assessing the distinctive features of a technology, to identify possible commercial applications of a technology, and to formulate a plan for marketing a technology. Hands-on work modifying products and developing prototypes will be involved. Over time, it is hoped that the Entrepreneurial Enterprise will spawn several new technology based businesses in Michigan.

Principal advisors include Dr. Paul A. Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics and Engineering Management, and Dr. Edward Lumsdaine, Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Other faculty and staff are available, as needed, for guidance and instruction. Contact: Dr. Paul A. Nelson pnelson@mtu.edu

Husky Game Development

ITOxygen, MTU's Information Technology Enterprise, has spun off its first separate entity -- a Video Game Development Enterprise to begin full operations in the Fall 2004. The Division operated during the Spring semester as a student-led Research Unit, during which time they explored the feasibility of a Gaming Enterprise and focused on potential industry sponsors, game-design research, and professional development and career opportunities. Husky Game Development has four long-term goals:

• To identify and to establish a professional relationship with a video game industry sponsor
• To design, build, and market a video game
• To prepare students for internships, co-ops, and careers in the gaming industry
• To develop a sustainable Video Game Enterprise Team

"Husky Games" will draw on MTU's already-existing teaching, learning, and research strengths since game-design concepts require cross-disciplinary efforts and collaboration: the Team will be seeking the participation of students, faculty, and staff from Education, Psychology, Fine Arts, Humanities, Computer Science, Anthropology, and any number of Engineering disciplines.
Contact:Students interested in joining the Gaming Division in the fall should contact Nathan Paul, Husky Games Director for Development, or Michael Moore, Team Advisor.

International Business Ventures Engineering Enterprise

This enterprise will develop a international partnership with universities from other countries. An initial partnership with the University of Toronto is proposed. Students of the partnership will have the opportunity to collaborate across national boundaries and develop skills in virtual teaming. Topics of study for this team would include:

• Product Conceptualization – Development of innovative products and technologies.

• Business Plan Development – Patent investigations, market research, financial analysis, venture capital development, self-employment topics, legal aspects of business/engineering and business start-up.

• Product Development - Concurrent product, process, and material design to identify optimal business solution for cost, quality, manufacturability, packaging and marketability concerns
  

Potential disciplines involved will likely include electrical, mechanical and materials engineering, business, computer science and technical communications. Faculty advisors will include Dr. Robert Warrington, Dean of Engineering and Dr. Pat Joyce, Professor, Business Adminstration.
Contact: Dr. Robert Warrington

Nanotechnology Enterprise

Nano-scale materials are the basic building blocks of nano-technology. As in previous developing technologies, the availability of high quality materials with properties specific to product design may be the limiting factor for the rate of progress in nano-technology. The Enterprise would address this problem using three basic components - Marketing Research and Product Development, Manufacturing and Process Development, and Analytical Services and Quality Control. Faculty advisor for this enterprise is Dr. Steven Hackney, Professor, Material Science and Engineering.
Contact: Dr. Steven Hackney hackney@mtu.edu

By BRAD SALMEN
Gazette Writer
HOUGHTON — Building and preparing a satellite is a time-consuming, detail-oriented task, as members of Michigan Tech University’s Aerospace Enterprise team can tell you. Since January 2003, the team has been preparing a small satellite for NASA designed to help model the earth’s climate. Tech is competing with nine other schools to build the best probe, with launch on a NASA space shuttle scheduled for 2006 or 2007.

The project involves painstaking attention to minute detail to insure everything works as planned. And part of that attention to detail involves determining just how the nanosatellite will react in the zero-gravity of the earth’s orbit.

Team members spent the “whole summer holed up in the lab� preparing for just such an experiment, said team member Tom Haas, a mechanical engineering student from downstate Grand Rapids.

“The experience of creating every aspect of a real experiment — from writing a proposal and raising the money, to soldering circuit boards, to integrating subsystems, to formulating a rigid procedure to conduct it — is something I do not think I could have gotten anywhere else as an undergraduate,� Haas said. “Although it would have been nice to see enough of the sun to do more than squint and sneeze.�

There aren’t many options available for simulating zero-gravity. So it came as an important opportunity, as well as a rare pleasure, for the students chosen to experience weightlessness aboard a NASA jet.

On July 27 and 28, a modified KC-135 airplane took off from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, with two Tech team members aboard each day. Known as the Weightless Wonder, the aircraft climbed to 36,000 feet before going into a steep dive.

For 30 seconds, until the plane leveled out at 22,000 feet, the five lucky team members chosen to participate experienced complete weightlessness.
Jeff Carpenter, also a mechanical engineering student from Grand Rapids, described the climb as having a large electromagnet on the floor of the plane that pulled him down to over two times the earth’s gravity. Then, as the plane began its dive, it was as if the electromagnet was simply turned off.

“Flying in zero-gravity was a unique experience that cannot be duplicated by anything on earth,� Carpenter said. “One of my most vivid memories was taking my sunglasses off my head and watching them literally float in front of my face after letting go. It is incredible.�

— For a complete version of this story, please see the print edition of The Daily Mining Gazette.

"A lot of the work we do is in bad weather," John Gierke says proudly of his Aqua Terra Tech team.

Out in the woods, often in snow or pounding rain, the students test water wells and perform geophysical surveys to figure out what's going on under their feet. Their goal is to characterize unseen groundwater resources and predict how the water might be affected by human activity and natural climatic variability. Read the Tech Topics story.