The Entrepreneurial Capstone Design Project turns engineers into entrepreneurs.
This rigorous course asks student teams to discover a real-world need, invent a product to fill it, and create a company that takes the product to market, all in the final eight months of their engineering degree.
In interdisciplinary teams from across the engineering faculty, students learn to talk to each other, to work together, and to listen to consumers. Guided by engineering faculty and business teaching assistants, they bring their engineering expertise to bear on the difficult problems they have identified—how to save hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars while keeping stormwater ponds fresh and contaminant-free? How to give expectant mothers peace of mind and physicians an early warning of fetal cardiovascular troubles? In 2024, student teams answered both these questions, developing a low-cost modular stormwater filtering system and a safe, comfortable, and wearable fetal heart monitor that feeds data to an iPhone.
While developing the technology, the teams receive the expert help of startup creators, investors, and business TAs. Students devise business plans, create SWOT analyses, and interview consumers. They learn to expertly pitch their ideas, understand the market, consider the impacts of their products on people and the environment, and act on feedback to improve their work. They win money for excellent pitches—up to $50,000 at a province-wide showcase. Student teams also make mistakes sometimes, but they pick themselves up and take what they’ve learned into a new venture—as one student team did, turning months of work on a new water hydraulics technology into an electronic pet toy capable of withstanding a dog’s strong bite. The Entrepreneurial Capstone Design course helps students become resilient, make connections among their peers and in the startup world, and position themselves for success after graduation.
