At 3 a.m. on most Saturdays last winter, a handful of students wheeled a barbecue smoker into the yard outside the Harvard Law School library, stuffed the contraption with charcoal and wood chips and lit them.
Around 5 a.m., a second group of students emerged wielding hunks of spice-rubbed brisket that they slid into the smoker. For the next seven to 10 hours, the students took turns tending to the meat, sometimes through blizzardlike conditions because the semester coincided with Boston’s snowiest winter on record.
This was not some strange undergraduate ritual. These were engineering students enrolled in a course called Engineering Problem Solving and Design. They had been assigned the task of creating a technologically sophisticated barbecue smoker that could outperform the best product on the market and be sold for less than $1,500.
The syllabus for the three-month course incorporated business and culinary lessons in addition to engineering skills. Guest speakers included a taste chemist, a barbecue pit master and patent specialists.
At the end of the semester in May, the final product — which included a smartphone app — was evaluated by the professor of the class, Kevin Kit Parker, and his teaching fellow, Peyton Nesmith. Also offering opinions were a chef from a local barbecue restaurant and two executives at Williams-Sonoma who had set some of the design parameters for the smoker.
Since then, Williams-Sonoma has expressed interest in carrying the Harvard smoker in its stores. Patrick Connolly, executive vice president and chief strategy and business development officer at Williams-Sonoma, called it “a real breakthrough.”
Mr. Parker says he has been flooded with interest from prospective investors and barbecue devotees. He, Mr. Nesmith and several students have said they would like to be involved in a company that manufactures and sells the Harvard smoker, which the school is patenting. Separately, two other students are planning to start their own company to sell a version of the Harvard smoker.
Harvard owns the intellectual property of its employees’ inventions; Mr. Parker and Mr. Nesmith would receive a portion of any money the smoker makes for the school. The students’ profits from the smoker would be theirs alone.
But first, there are steps the groups must take, such as refining the prototype and developing a plan to commercialize the smoker.
It would not be the first business to be spun off from the class. In 2012, Mr. Parker, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and served in Afghanistan four times, challenged his students to develop software to help police departments do intelligence analysis against gangs. Several students from the class went on to start a related software company called Mark43.
Undergraduate courses at other schools also have spawned businesses.StartX, a nonprofit accelerator that helps Stanford entrepreneurs develop business ideas, was developed in a classroom at the university. And an M.I.T. entrepreneurship course has led to several businesses, including Rest Devices, which makes the Mimo brand of smart baby-monitoring devices, as well as the high-tech apparel company Ministry of Supply, andCharitweet, which lets people donate to charities through Twitter.
idea for the smoker project at a cooking contest in a Memphis parking lot before a college football game. He was stunned by the smokers he saw. “I mean, just piles of metal junk,” is how he described them. “Trash cans with smokestacks. It was offensive to an engineer.”
He recognized an opportunity to create a more reliable, scientifically engineered smoker. Before the class started, Mr. Parker and Mr. Nesmith became certified barbecue judges with the Kansas City Barbeque Society to better evaluate the briskets coming out of Harvard Yard.
When the semester began, only two of the 16 students in the class had smoked meat before, two were vegetarians and five were from abroad and did not know what American-style barbecue was.
They began by analyzing smokers on the market, focusing on Big Green Egg, a popular one with a ceramic cooking chamber. They evaluated the extra-large version, which costs $1,200. “We went through the patent of the Big Green Egg and just completely dissected it,” Mr. Parker said. “Where’s the opportunity here? Where’s the weakness here?”
They built computer models of Big Green Egg, of the brisket and, eventually, of their own smoker. They ran hundreds of computer simulations, and they learned that maintaining a precise, steady cooking temperature is crucial to evenly breaking down the meat’s collagen, tenderizing it. Several students spent their spring break taking a crash course in ceramics at the Harvard Ceramic Studio to build two prototypes of the smoker.
During the smoking sessions, the students attached sensors to the cooking surfaces and collected smoke particles and airflow data. They also inserted thermal imaging devices and probes into the brisket. “It was a heavily instrumented piece of meat,” Mr. Parker said. “It looked like it was in an intensive care unit.”
The final design was a 300-pound ceramic smoker with an hourglass shape that was inspired by power plant cooling towers. An internal computer controls fans that blow oxygen into the fire; it calculates whether the fire needs more or less oxygen and communicates the smoker’s temperature to a smartphone app. Refueling most other smokers requires opening the top and inserting more charcoal and wood chips, which destabilizes the temperature.
A chute on the side of the Harvard smoker lets the chef add more fuel without disrupting its internal temperature. Sensors gauge fuel levels, the temperature of the cooking surface and the weight of the food being smoked, and transmit that information to the app.
“Instead of the cook having to sit and babysit the smoker all day, for a 12- to 15-hour smoke, they could be off with their family and check the temperatures on their app,” said Joe Festa, a bioengineering major who took the course. They can also share that information with family and friends planning to attend the barbecue, turning the smoker into what Mr. Parker calls “an entertainment device.”
He brought in Williams-Sonoma as a client to give the students a sense of urgency and encourage them to think of themselves as engineers rather than college students. Several students said it worked.
“It was the first class with a real work environment where it meant more than just a letter grade,” said Michel Maalouly, an environmental engineering major. “You’re developing a device that people want to use.”
In the weeks leading to the final display, which included an hourlong PowerPoint presentation and a brisket cook-off, some of the students logged 60 or 70 hours of coursework on the class a week. The final push was a 96-hour stretch of continuous smoking and experiments.
“By the end of the class, it didn’t feel like a class at all,” Mr. Festa said. “It felt more like we were working for a start-up company.”
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