Technology company PTC pledged a record-setting in-kind donation of $18.8 million Friday to help Boston University officials develop BU’s new Engineering Product Innovation Center, officials said.
The center, which will open in the fall 2013 semester as part of the College of Engineering, will serve as an educational tool related to engineering and manufacturing, said BU spokesman Colin Riley.
“The College of Engineering and [ENG] Dean [Kenneth] Lutchen have received an $18 million in-kind gift in software from PTC,” Riley said. “That software is the latest and greatest in manufacturing.”
The donation is the largest ENG has ever received, Lutchen said.
“It really validates the exciting ways in which we’re going to try to educate the engineers of the future of the United States and the world and continue to innovate technologies and products,” he said.
Riley said the EPIC will be located at 750 Commonwealth Ave. in the former Guitar Center space.
“The purpose of it is to encompass the entire cycle of manufacturing, from concept through creation … where people who have interest in engineering will actually get to see how the whole process works, not just their segment of it,” he said.
PTC donated two types of software, Lutchen said. The first allows students to create a virtual three-dimensional design of potential products, while the second allows students to manage the development and eventual manufacturing and marketing of the product.
The software will help students become more prepared for the workplace by exposing them to different components of the manufacturing process as well as to innovative technology, Riley said.
“With these software programs, the key is that students will be working using tools that are in the workplace,” he said. “So they will be making a seamless transition from the college experience into the workplace.”
Lutchen said the center will be important to providing students with a thorough understanding of technologies that are used to create products.
“The center will have a very major impact on the holistic way that engineering students at BU understand technologies, from the computer-aided design of a potential product to prototyping that kind of design to eventually creating it in a way that can be deployed for profit in large numbers,” he said.
The center reflects ENG officials’ goal to have engineering students of different disciplines working together, Lutchen said.
“Almost all kinds of projects are at the intersections of many kinds of technologies in engineering,” he said. “So, we’re going to try and create courses in which engineers of different disciplines get to work with engineers of other disciplines and understand how to create a product that has integrated technologies.”
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