Towards the international engineer manager

Summary form only given. Many engineering and business courses do not prepare students to work within a multi-disciplinary and multi-national frame. This leaves students deficient in the skills necessary to function effectively as an engineer manager in the global context. To overcome this situation ten universities located across Europe have formed a consortium to develop a common set of modules that provide the framework within which students could pursue their interests in multi-national team-based product development. The participating education institutions are located in Great Britain (Glasgow Caledonian University, as initiator and project leader, and Sheffield), Belgium (Liege), France (St. Denis, Paris), Germany (Berlin and Esslingen), Greece (Heraklion, Larissa, and Patras) and Sweden (Jonkoping). Engineering as well as business departments are involved. Work was funded within the SOCRATES programme of the European Commission for a two-year period starting in August 1996. The main objective of the modules is to provide a learning environment for students from various disciplines to work together within an institute and between institutes in different countries on structured project work that simulates the work place of the modern international engineer manager. Three modules have been developed which would normally be studied consecutively but also may also be studied as discrete modules. These are: project management techniques, entrepreneurship, and product development.