Turning big ideas into bold futures

Students in the School of Business and Society’s Entrepreneurship Capstone come in with sketches for startup ideas and leave with well-developed plans.

“It’s kind of a unique class, as it’s done in a way that’s very hands-on—there are no wrong or right answers. It’s more so focusing on how your business is going to serve a market,” Professor Audrey Young said.

Young co-taught this summer’s capstone with Professor Jim Spee, Ph.D., mentoring 27 students with 22 different ideas. Together, Young and Spee guided the students as they interviewed potential customers, collected data, validated their business assumptions, and narrowed their target markets.

They are encouraged to “prove themselves wrong,” Young said, and reminded that “most businesses don’t end up being what the founder thought they would be when starting. Most businesses pivot.”

Ideas from the summer capstone included opening a hair extension salon, developing a women’s health app, creating an AI-powered beard and hair trimming device, and starting a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) consulting firm. In that case, the student had been running his own air conditioning business for 20 years, but after conducting customer discovery and data research with constituents, he decided to “flip the whole thing on its head and restructure it,” Young said. Instead of focusing on residential customers, he shifted to school districts, believing he could “build that up and then give the business to his kids.”

Every student’s mindset shifts through the course, as they learn new ways to problem solve and communicate in a way that is “intentional and purposeful,” Young said. The life of an entrepreneur can be hard, but the capstone sets students up so they can better handle whatever comes their way and take the next steps.

“Sometimes you’re told that no one is going to buy your product, and it takes a lot of resilience to say you tried and it didn’t work, but I need to keep going and moving forward,” Young said.