open2012 business-development-experience-capstone

Business Development Experience:A Senior Capstone Project for Business Students using

Emerging Technologies from Engineering

Darrell RadsonDean

School of Business and Economics

Michigan

Michigan Technological University

Michigan Technological University• Year founded: 1885• City Population: 14,000, including our sister city of Hancock, Michigan• Campus Size: 925-acre campus—about a ten-minute walk from one end to

the other—plus a 4,500-acre research forest

Engineering Education

Business Education

• Capstone Course??

Senior Capstone:Business Development Experiences

Formally: two courses:• BUS 4991 - Business Development I Focuses on the development of a

business plan including marketing plans, organization, distribution, and financial projections. Emphasis is on the senior design project or enterprise project assigned to the student. Credits: 3.0 Lec-Rec-Lab: (0-3-0) Semesters Offered: Fall Pre-Requisite(s): (BA 1100 or BUS 1100) and (BA 2110 or BUS 2300) and (BA 2300 or BA 2330 or ACC 2000) and (BA 2310 or BA 2340 or ACC 2100) and (BA 2500 or BUS 2200) and (BA 2700 or MGT 2000) and (BA 3200 or MIS 2000) and (BA 3400 or FIN 3000) and (BA 3610 or OSM 3000) and (BA 3700 or MGT 3000) and (BA 3800 or MKT 3000)

• BUS 4992 - Business Development II Completion and presentation of the business plan for the senior design project or enterprise project assigned to the student. Credits: 3.0 Lec-Rec-Lab: (0-3-0) Semesters Offered: Spring Pre-Requisite(s): BA 4991

College of Engineering Senior Design

Enterprise Program


“… require spending a full year with a Senior Design or Enterprise team, acting as consultants and writing a business plan. The experience mimics an industry situation: students are required to seek out information, come up to speed on technical specifications, communicate with the team, identify potential markets, find funding sources, and make profitable business recommendations to suit the current market needs. At the end of the year, teams present their written plan in a format that is similar to those used by start-up businesses to secure funding.”

Examples – Last Year

Examples – This year• Electric Vehicle Support Equipment (EVSE), Transportation Enterprise

The challenge for the business school students is to propose and develop a sustainable business model for an electric charging station in Houghton downtown area.

• Accessible Light Fixture, Senior Design The business school students aim to first locate a market for this, find channels of distribution, business model to generate and subsequently sustain the revenue stream.

• Economic Recovery of Alloying Elements from Grinding Swarf, Senior Design (Recover usable and valuable Cobalt and Nickel metals from the wastes generated from the "swarf,” wastes from metal grinding, drilling, drilling, etc). The business school students aim to first locate potential sources that generate a lot of these wastes, then locate a market that need and could benefit from the technology that could recover cobalt and nickel and also a market for distributing this recovered cobalt and nickel.

Next Year and Beyond

• Required for all Seniors– Estimate: 20 teams

Challenges

• Students viewing this as an isolated class.• Communication between the students and the

engineering students.• Access to necessary information (market, technical,

financial)– “We had to get up to speed on the technology, find the right

people to talk to, and figure out where to find the information we needed. It really required initiative to get things done, which is tough when you have a full load of classes.”

Challenges

• Developing a new set of intermediate deliverables.

• Finding good/suitable projects.• Industry sponsors.– A positive and a negative

open2012 business-development-experience-capstone

Technology