In the end, the team is shaken but still standing; they leave the dais having offered answers to every question or objection. They made out better than an earlier team, whose presentation was halted temporarily by high-tech gremlins. And they made out much better than many other food science students around the country, for whom such a meeting—with its hard-eyed exchanges and grudging respect—are still several years away. As graduates of “Food Product Boot Camp,” these college seniors feel ready to play in the A-leagues.

The course, taught by a team including (right) John Lord from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and Lam Hood from Penn State, gives students a taste of how food product development works in the business world.

That’s what students have come to expect from the class, which is called “Food Product Innovation Management.” More than just an upper-division course for food science majors, it’s a problem-based learning experience that spans several academic disciplines. “The class is designed to enhance career skills like critical thinking, decision making, teamwork, and communication in the context of the industry’s approach to developing and marketing new and improved food products,” according to Lamartine Hood, co-creator of the course and former dean of the college. “This means that our students must come to the course ready to do much more than take notes and give answers.”

The course was created in 1997, but its roots go back to the early 1970s. “I taught a course at Cornell University called ‘Concepts of Product Development,’” Hood says. “It was an interdisciplinary, problem-based course that brought in ag marketers, lawyers, and others to talk about the cases they dealt with and the problems they faced. In 1986, I came to Penn State as dean of the college. Along the way, particularly in the dean’s office, employers kept saying that our graduates were really well prepared academically, but lacked the ability to think critically, analyze and solve problems, make decisions, work in teams, and communicate through speech and in writing. Having heard that for so long, I thought a course in product development would help our students integrate what they learned in food science and ag business courses with problem-solving and communication skills.”

Students in the class are assigned to teams that search for a new product opportunity and assemble an exhaustive plan for developing and launching the product. They complete every step in the process from brainstorming to the proposal stage, using state-of-the-art market analysis techniques. Teams are assigned industry mentors from major product development companies, who offer insights and ask the tough questions that students will encounter in the real world.

Hood teamed with agricultural economist Spiro Stefanou and food scientist Ramaswamy Anantheswaran for the first offering of the course in 1997. Anantheswaran continued with the course until 1999, when the team was joined by Barry Zoumas, Warehime Professor of Agribusiness and former vice president of science and technology for Hershey Foods.

A fateful Penn State seminar in 1997 brought even more innovation to the course, as John Lord, professor of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, described a startlingly similar course he was teaching at his institution. The similarities prompted Hood to suggest a leap into distance education.

“After his presentation,” Hood says, “I went up to John and said, ‘We’re teaching a similar food science development course. Yours is very marketing-oriented, ours is food science- and business-oriented. Why don’t we put the two courses together?’ Not only were both courses problem-based seminars with virtually no lectures—real active-learning situations—but they also brought together what are generally regarded as two of the best food marketing programs in the country. It was kind of a natural that we would come together.”

Today, collaborative class sessions are held weekly at both Penn State and St. Joe’s using PictureTel videocon-ferencing and the Web. Faculty and students from Monterrey Tech in Mexico and Texas A & M also have participated at various levels, and food industry representatives make interactive presentations. Subsequently, many of them become mentors for the class teams.

Students are issued laptop computers with network connectivity and software, and team members communicate with instructors and each other via special networking software based at St. Joe’s.

A major component of the course’s success is the complete devotion to problem-based instruction. “If you start a class off as lecture, students get the hint: they’re supposed to sit down and shut up,” Spiro Stefanou says. “Then, if mid-semester you say, ‘Okay, be creative’, they don’t believe it—you’ve already told them to sit down and shut up.

“So we developed this as a totally lecture-less, problem-based course, and went from there. Now we want to measure the value of this approach, and how it adds to students’ understanding of the food product development process.

“While in school, you deal with problems that are hard, but highly structured. Real-world problems are hard, but highly unstructured,” Stefanou says. “With this course, we want to bring the real world into the classroom and give students an authentic experience in the university. Lectures artificially organize the ideas, concepts, and knowledge; students can write down the right answers, but they’re not making decisions.

“In this class, the faculty serve as resources. Instead of me articulating their learning agenda, the students set it for themselves by facilitating questions. In a way, the purpose of the course is to be better than real-world experience. A university is not the real world—it’s a setting for experimentation, a place to make mistakes and then learn from them. That’s the setting that we’re aiming for, and it’s hard to achieve.”