Engagement between students and sponsors is customizable, with a one-hour per week recommendation to ensure project progress. All students work virtually so sponsor/company locations are flexible! Our student teams are multidisciplinary and come from a variety of subject areas. This means that each group of students may have a different set of skills.

In this project, you (the partnering organization) provide our students with a realistic business problem of your choice. Ideally, this should be a question or topic that will have a real impact on your business. Our students will analyze the key issues and recommend solutions by applying their knowledge of expertise.

Areas of focus and project examples include but are not limited to:

1. Market research

• Target Audience Research
• Product research
• Pricing research
• Promotion research
• Distribution research

2. Marketing

• Marketing plans and campaigns
• Growth strategies
• Social media marketing
• Retail marketing

3. Data analytics

• Analysis of customer segmentation relative to different products and services
• Investigate predictive models to understand trends in sales, attrition rates, and profits that impact your business
• Propose new ways to visualize data through tables and plots that can provide new insights for managers

4. Design thinking

• Gather high-quality customer insights using a human-centric approach to create product concepts that fill users’ unmet needs
• Design Thinking activities, including persona creation, rapid idea generation, and prototype creation

5. Strategy

• Strategic Planning
• New market entry
• New product offerings
• Streamlining operations or channels

6. Entrepreneurship

• Opportunity assessment
• Industry and competitor research
• Research target market segments
• Compile, clean, and process relevant data
• Research opportunities to improve project efficiencies

Application Process

We will be confirming client projects throughout November. Our students will be signing up to this program at the start of December and you will be assigned a group of students by December 7th. As part of the project, we expect clients and students to meet at the beginning as well as a few times throughout the project. We understand this project goes over the holidays so the times at which you meet with students is flexible as long as the project is completed by January 8th.