Integrating systems and business engineering in an international context: The spacetech postgraduate program

Successful education of engineers needs continuous adaptation to track the changing needs of industry. The adaptation is not limited to technological advance or to the changing mentality of new students but also to end-to-end engineering approaches using Systems Engineering. However, industries today require more and more engineers with profound knowledge of business engineering to arrive at successful products - a fact which universities typically have not sufficiently taken into account yet. The SpaceTech program of the Delft University of Technology is an international postgraduate program for experienced high potentials seeking expertise in space systems and business engineering. The program centres around a Central Case Project where a group of international participants exercise space systems engineering fundamentals together with marketing and business engineering tools to create a financially viable virtual business. Based on more than 10 years of experience from the SpaceTech program, the learning objectives of Systems Engineering and business engineering and their interrelations are analyzed. Topics of past Central Case Projects are summarized and trends are extracted. The potentials of integrating Systems and Business Engineering are identified and their limitations in an educational environment are addressed.