Want to help your students identify meaningful projects that create real value? Want to accelerate a market research analysis? Our AI-enabled process can help. This EM-rooted process guides students to opportunities to create extraordinary value in their projects.

Curiosity: Students identify an area of interest or a population they want to serve and explore the difficulties and challenges faced by members of these communities. They challenge existing solutions and ask where things could be better.   

Connections: The process detailed in this card guides teams through several parallel processes (including AI-enabled methods) to gain insight into opportunities to create value.

Create Value: With a problem identified the students are coached through ideation processes and a concept selection funnel to uncover a solution statement to capture their unique value proposition for the project.

Our Capstone experience historically started with teams of students identifying potential problems to solve through their capstone work. But, by starting with the problem students often struggled to identify good problems to solve: too many provided no opportunity to create value. 

So instead, this opening assignment for a capstone design project starts with a population rather than a problem. Once the students select a target user group or product class, the students are guided through an AI-enabled preliminary market analysis. The process has the students query free AI chatbots explore challenges and problems faced by their target population and investigate common customer issues with existing solutions.

After the AI-based market analysis, the teams talk with 2-3 potential human customers and observe potential users performing relevant activities. Report A has the student team present a Customer Profile and Problem Statement.

The Report B assignment guides students through developing a Solution Statement and a Unique Value Proposition for the problem they identified in Report A. Students are challenged to use numerous ideation tools to make connections across domains to develop a broad collection of possible solutions to the identified problem and then work through a selection funnel to arrive at a Solution Statement and Unique Value Proposition.