The Idea Behind Engineering and Management

Engineering and Management at McMaster University is a unique five year program that integrates the technical education of the engineer with a business education for management.

Engineers design and oversee the making/building of new things in collaboration with other professionals.  Those new things run the gamut from buildings, bridges, dams and highways to cellphones, laptops, automobiles and airliners.  Engineering and Management is about doing the designing and overseeing within the context of business organizations.  Those business organizations sustain themselves with the income they make by charging fees for the designing and overseeing, and/or by selling their designed and manufactured products to customers.  Put another way, engineering is the activity of using scientific understanding and technical knowledge to create useful devices and processes, and management is the activity of delivering them to people at an affordable price which covers the cost of inventing, manufacturing and selling them.  Without business many of the products of the creative genius of science and engineering might never be made available to the general public either as infrastructure (e.g. roads and bridges) or as products (e.g. laptops and ipods).

Many engineers who start their careers doing purely engineering work go on to become managers or executives in the firms for which they work.  They do this when they discover that in addition to being good engineers they have a talent for business management.  Many other engineers become entrepreneurs and start their own companies, often to sell products which they invented in their work as engineers.

Many of our best known and most successful businesses have been built upon useful devices created by engineers.  Apple, General Motors, Sony, Bayer, Motorola, BMW, Boeing, IBM and Microsoft are all firms that have prospered through the commercialization of technology.  Such firms succeed because they have people who work for them who understand the complexities of both technology and business.
 
The engineering and management program develops graduates who understand both sides of the picture and, just as importantly, how the two sides fit together.  People with only an engineering education often understand the technology but not the business side.  People with only a business education often understand the business but not the technology.  With only part of the picture they are less able to combine technology and business in ways that effectively serve customers and provide the business with a profit.  For this reason the Engineering and Management Program provides a solid education in both engineering and business.

The integration of engineering and business is an element of the Engineering and Management Program that is of utmost importance.  The program ensures that graduates know the basic elements of engineering and business, and how they can be combined effectively.  Many companies have failed because they did not have this critical third element.  The Engineering and Management Program at McMaster teaches integration in the following ways:

1. Students are required to take three engineering and management courses that are specifically designed to integrate engineering and management issues.
2. In all years of the program students must take both engineering and business courses so they constantly work with both simultaneously.  This helps build an intuitive appreciation of their combination.
3. Engineering and Management students sit in the same business and economics courses as business students and work in teams with them, learning to bridge the gap between engineering and business at an interpersonal as well as intellectual level.
4. Students must complete a fully accredited engineering degree and combine it with 15 accredited business and economics courses in order to graduate.

Another important aspect of the E&M program is related to the statement above that engineers do their work in collaboration with other professionals.  For example, an engineer may have to work with architects, lawyers, software designers, people who specialize in marketing or manufacturing, product designers, representatives of government or with managers.  Managers also work with many different kinds of people.  It is therefore very important to learn how to work with people as well as the technical ideas of engineering.  For this reason an important focus of the E&M program is the development of human relations skills that make for more productive collaboration with many different kinds of people.