Short Course Description
Propel Impact Entrepreneurship Lab is a semester-long course designed for interdisciplinary Global MBA and design students. Invoking business skills and design thinking, students will develop innovative services aimed at solving social challenges.
The course will convene around key themes and opportunities to prototype tangible venture ideas with potentially impactful paths towards market.
Within a studio environment, students will actively engage in real-world problem solving, based on real-word data to promote real world impact, around a central behavioural challenge.
Propel Impact Entrepreneurship Lab project-based learning will focus on ideation, design thinking, impact business models, entrepreneurial skills, teamwork and communication needed to transform challenges into opportunities and develop innovative approaches that demonstrate the potential for measurable, sustainable economic, social and environmental impact.
Each year, the Propel Impact Entrepreneurship Lab will focus on a key behavioural theme, building around it a network of academics, industry experts, thought leaders, partner organizations and community members serving as a real-world context for projects. Additionally, students will gain an introductory exposure to relevant technologies and innovative business approaches surrounding the semester?s theme:
Explore
Students will gain experience collecting multiple data points to uncover needs, opportunities and new understandings surrounding their challenge. An integrative impact model and scenarios will elicit problem-solving approaches and ideation.
Design
Working in teams, students will engage in ideation and design of a venture related to needs and opportunities surrounding the key theme. This includes delineation of the requisite data, technologies, user experience, business model, partners, all based on a driving behavioral approach and a dedicated impact model.
Propel
Students will gain the tools to communicate and present their venture, including service naming, communication and presentation, alongside preliminary user or market validation.
Context: The Propel Impact Lab Theme for 2020/21 is "To:Health".
"To:Health" will reimagine and redress personal health management by focusing on personal and communal behavioural changes enabling continuous self care. We will explore the challenges of personal health management to ideate new behavioral approaches that can positively impact individuals before, during and after illness.
Among its many health challenges, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the significance of each of our individual behaviours? affect on our own health and the health of others. This ?perfect behavioural storm? has exposed a public health crisis, that is tightly coupled with our personal health. For Covid-19, short of a vaccine, behavioural changes represent the only panacea. Social distancing, face masks, hand-washing, temperature and oximeter measurements and contact tracing are all behavioral changes aimed at curtailing the chain of infection.
Covid-19 has also manifested entrenched structural inequities such as pre-existing conditions, non-inclusive healthcare access, demographics and insurance, among others, each of which has impacted outcomes.
Taken as an exemplar of global behavioral change, Covid-19 has changed our awareness of personal health management irrevocably.
Full Syllabus
