INNO 652 CAPSTONE PROJECT AND PITCH
This course will draw together the experiential, curricular, and individual components of the Master’s degree. The Capstone project serves as a vehicle to integrate what students learn in their graduate coursework, impact lab participation, community engagement field work, and study abroad (if applicable). It does this by providing an opportunity for students to demonstrate their ability to apply what they have learned in the program in a situation that approximates aspects of the post-graduate professional activities in which they intend to engage. It is a bridge between full-time graduate study and fulltime involvement in the world of social and health innovation and entrepreneurship. By the end of the capstone, students must demonstrate their ability to develop and execute a work plan that leads to a social or health innovation; iterate a project sufficiently to have produced a resume-worthy accomplishment; build strong professional relationships with and draw upon the resources of faculty, community practitioners and entrepreneurs, student colleagues, and external advisors. Students’ capstone projects should be creative, have the potential to create positive change, be innovative, and reflect students’ personal and professional identity. Capstone projects may be solo efforts or team endeavors, depending on the nature of the proposal. All students engaged in a capstone will meet periodically to both learn techniques that cut across the range of projects undertaken that semester, and to advise, coach, and support each other. Each student or team will conclude the project by presenting it to an audience of students, faculty, community-based entrepreneurs and partners. Because each student’s interests are different, their capstone projects may take different forms. They may create a new organization, build a prototype, or apply a social or health enterprise technique to an existing organization. Some students will work in the U.S., some abroad. The common thread is that these are all hands-on efforts intended to result in doing something, in taking an action that leads to some form of societal betterment.