The NextGen NPD & Tech Expo, held for the first time on November 20 at the Library Art Gallery, was organized within the scope of the ENG 206 Business Communication course. The event marked an exciting launch for what will hopefully become a lasting tradition, bringing together creativity, innovation and professional presentation. Throughout the expo, students showcased their original product designs, the culmination of a semester-long professional simulation that required them to ideate, develop, pitch and present real-world solutions. This assignment was not a single event but rather Stage 4 in a five-part performance-based project in which students continuously shift roles, audiences, missions and communication strategies, learning business communication by doing it.
Throughout the semester, teams designed innovative products and attempted to find potential manufacturers, developing skills in branding, feasibility analysis, cost projection, persuasion and negotiation. In this stage specifically, students transformed the gallery into a working business exhibition space.
Posters lined the walls like trade-fair booths, and students waited for visiting manufacturers to approach, question and evaluate the products. Each conversation required professionalism, quick thinking and audience-awareness skills normally practiced in the industry, not the classroom.
Dressed in business attire and fully immersed in their roles, students confidently pitched their designs, responded to questions, compared production strategies and analyzed the suitability of competing products. The result: a two-hour experience that felt less like coursework and more like a real-world consultancy exchange.
Many students described the Expo as useful, exciting, challenging, social, insightful and one of the most practical academic experiences they have had so far. They expressed pride in speaking professionally, engaging with unfamiliar teams and taking responsibility for communication beyond the classroom.
The course now advances to Stage 5, where students step fully into the role of manufacturers and prepare to write a refusal letter, declining a product proposal from the Expo and delivering bad news with sensitivity, logic and professionalism. This final transition completes the experiential learning cycle: designing, pitching, negotiating and evaluating all the way to refusing with diplomacy.
ENG 206 continues to demonstrate that communication is not only explained but also practiced, embodied and experienced.
