The AIChE National Student Design Competition has been offered annually since 1932. It is the oldest and most prestigious competition for undergraduate students in AIChE. It has focused on process and not product design. It has relied on volunteers from the Student Chapters Committee of AIChE to obtain or develop suitable problems. Dialog in AIChE has considered the potential change in focus of the undergraduate curriculum to a greater component of product design, but to date this has not been done. Further, for competitive reasons, many companies are reluctant to share devepoments in technology as challenges to students, whether of the product or process variety. There has been an on going lack of success in obtaining people willing to provide problems structured for graduating seniors in chemical engineering that deal with new technology developments in such areas as biotechnology, nanotechnology, or other developing fields. This has been offset somewhat by government willingness to offer challenges in environmental and safety areas. The Design Subcommittee, SCC, AIChE, believes that assistance from the management division might be useful in dealing with this challenge. It is important to note that students are bright and capable and thrive best on challenges that they know are related to the real world they face. Since NSF is supporting curriculum development in chemical engineering, it is time to address what AIChE can do. By focusing on this long stanging competiton in a more structured and deliberately supported way, AIChE can do much to promote the education of chemical engineering students and do much to promote the competitveness future AIChE leaders in the U.S. economy. Improved networking of the management division of AIChE with the SCC of AIChE could go a long way to making available challenging problems in developing technologies, that nonetheless will not compromise the competitve business interests that are an inevitable part of new technologies. The SCC prefers to have "real world" as opposed to "academic" problems available for this competition. This is not always possible, but the need is there because the appeal to students of such real problems is great.