Final Group Project

16 course points · Paper: 8 · Creative project + presentation: 8

🌎 Overview

For this project, your group will interview a founder, study their business, and connect their experience to what we’ve learned in class. You’ll share your work in two forms: an analytical paper and a creative project you’ll present to the class.

The question holding all of this together is: How does this founder’s experience support, complicate, or challenge the entrepreneurial lessons we’ve been developing?

🤔 Rationale

Throughout the semester, we’re hearing a lot of stories about people starting businesses. Your job is to make something useful out of those stories: identify lessons, investigate when they hold up, and figure out what another entrepreneur could actually do with them.

The interview gives you a chance to ask better questions, test the lessons we’ve been developing, and see what those lessons look like in someone’s actual decisions. The paper makes your reasoning visible; the creative project helps you make that reasoning useful to an audience.

🏗️ Structure

Your group + founder

Work in a group of 3–4. Choose an entrepreneur who’s available for an interview, either in person or remotely, and whose business gives you enough substance to investigate. Use these guidelines:

The entrepreneur founded the venture rather than buying an existing business. Starting a new franchise location counts.
The business is at least two years old.
Annual revenue is roughly $500,000 or more.
The business has at least two full-time employees or a full-time partner.

If you’re unsure whether your subject fits—or you’re considering a public figure you can’t interview—check with me before committing. The interview should help you learn things a quick search wouldn’t tell you.

Keep your group members’ full names, proposed founder, company name(s), a brief company description, and interview access in your shared group project document. When your founder confirms an interview date, @mention me in your team’s Slack thread/channel with that date; if you already did this, you are set. These are progress checks, with no separate points or eLC upload.

How the workbook fits

Use your individual course workbook to keep track of promising themes, useful evidence, and questions you want to ask your founder. The learning journal is worth 10 points: five automatic transition points and five for the developed themes. External engagement papers also belong in the workbook, but are graded in a separate 10-point category: three equally weighted papers, with Paper 1 waived for full credit. Follow the Theme Journal and External Engagement tabs for their separate deadlines.

Bring those ideas into your group’s research. You can build on the thinking you’ve already done, then develop a shared analysis grounded in the interview. There’s no additional ten-theme showcase or separate reflection paper attached to this project.

The paper

Write an 8–10-page paper; double spacing is fine. Use the six areas below to give it a clear structure, and weave your themes into the places where they help explain a decision or outcome.

The creative project + presentation

Choose a format that helps us understand your founder and what you’ve learned. A podcast, documentary, TED-style talk, photographic essay, magazine, graphic novel, interactive website, game, or song could all work. You can also come up with another approach that does the job well. Have some fun with this!

A PowerPoint or similar slide presentation isn’t an eligible format for this project. Think about what your chosen medium lets you show, explain, or help us experience.

Your classroom presentation or demonstration must fit within 10 minutes. The complete creative product can be longer—a 30-minute podcast, for example—but you’ll need to choose what to share during your allotted time. Both the full product and the classroom presentation should make your learning clear; don’t leave the analysis buried in material your audience never encounters.

What your work needs to address

1. Origin story

What inspired the founder? How did they recognize an opportunity to create value, and what moved them from noticing it to pursuing it?

2. Business model

How does the business create value for its customers and for itself? Explain the customer value proposition and the pain point it addresses. Use the Business Model Canvas as a guide to understanding how the pieces fit together.

3. Resources + tradeoffs

What financial and human resources did the venture need? How did the founder get access to resources they didn’t control? What did they give up, accept, or change along the way?

4. Reducing risk

What did the founder test before investing heavily? Look for early experiments, minimum viable products, assumptions, and pivots. Explain what they learned and how it changed their decisions.

5. Founding team dynamics

How did the team handle roles, relationships, and rewards? Where were those aligned? Where did they get out of step, and what happened as a result?

6. Challenges

What significant obstacles arose early in the business? How did the founder respond? Explain the results, including what remained unresolved.

Across these areas, help us understand the person as well as the venture: the founder’s background, motivations, characteristics, personal challenges, and successes. Establish the company’s current team, funding history, competitive landscape, and potential market size. Your creative project should highlight all six areas, even though it won’t have the same level of detail as the paper.

Making useful connections

Both deliverables must clearly identify and apply at least five entrepreneurial themes. A theme is an actionable lesson that could help an entrepreneur improve their chances of success or reduce their risk of failure.

“Both founders were persistent” is a starting observation. To turn it into a theme, explain what they persisted with, what evidence guided them, when they changed course, and what someone else could learn from those choices.

For each theme:

State the lesson explicitly. What could an entrepreneur do or consider?
Support it with at least two course stories or sources. Name the cases, speakers, or other material and explain the specific evidence.
Apply it to your founder. Does their experience follow the pattern, complicate it, or suggest a limit? Explain why.

Here’s a useful structure for your thinking: “Across [source A] and [source B], we noticed [actionable lesson]. Our founder’s experience [supports / complicates / challenges] that lesson because [specific evidence and analysis].”

You’re welcome to identify themes we haven’t named together in class. Just support them well. Five thoughtfully developed themes will serve you better than ten labels with very little behind them.

📓 Grading

Required elements

Before submitting, make sure you’ve:

Interviewed an eligible founder and researched the person, company, and industry.
Addressed all six content areas in the paper and highlighted them in the creative project.
Developed at least five clearly sourced themes in each deliverable, with specific comparison to your founder.
Produced an organized, carefully edited 8–10-page paper.
Created an engaging project in an eligible format and prepared a presentation of no more than 10 minutes.
Collaborated so that everyone understands the research and analysis, including the parts someone else took the lead on.

Paper — 8 points

The paper’s criteria total 8 course points:

Course themes — 2.4 points. Clearly identify, source, apply, and synthesize at least five themes throughout the paper. Compare and contrast the course evidence with your founder’s experience.
Founder knowledge — 1.6 points. Show depth in your understanding of the founder’s history, motivations, characteristics, challenges, and successes.
Company + industry knowledge — 1.6 points. Explain the business’s origin, team, funding, competition, and potential market with specific research.
Structure + professionalism — 1.6 points. Make the paper easy to follow, meet the length requirement, and edit carefully for clear writing, grammar, and spelling.
Original research — 0.8 points. Share substantive information that goes beyond a cursory search. Help us see what your investigation revealed.

These are the same five paper criteria, scaled directly to the revised course total. If the eLC rubric displays a score out of 100, multiply the percentage by 8 to find its contribution to your course grade: 86/100 earns 6.88 course points.

Creative project + presentation — 8 points

I’ll evaluate this as one integrated piece of work. I’m looking at six things: the quality of your themes, your knowledge of the founder and business, preparation, creativity and engagement, use of the allotted time, and collaboration.

The following descriptions give you a sense of the performance levels. Scores between them are possible when different parts of the work land at different levels.

8 — Exceptional. Insightful, specific analysis; a creative format that deepens our understanding; polished delivery within the time limit; and clear evidence of shared preparation and knowledge.
6.8 — Strong. Complete, thoughtful work with clear themes and research, an effective format, and a prepared presentation. Some connections or execution could go further.
5.6 — Meets the basics. The main requirements are present and understandable, but the analysis, creative choices, or delivery need more development.
4 — Developing. Important requirements are missing or underdeveloped, or preparation and execution substantially limit what the audience can learn.
1.6 — Minimal. There’s little usable evidence of the required research, analysis, or preparation.
0 — No assessable work submitted.

Ways to make the work excellent

Follow the interesting details. Ask a useful follow-up question. Notice when a lesson that seemed obvious in one case works differently here. Explain the consequences of a decision, and let your creative format help us understand them.

I’m interested in the quality of your thinking and how well you communicate it. You don’t need an expensive production setup to do either of those things well.

⏰ Timeline

Submission + presentation

Submit through your shared group Google Doc and links: include the analytical paper and a clearly labeled link to the creative deliverable, with every group member’s name. Share the document with [email protected] with permission to comment, and make sure I can open every linked file or recording. Once the completed work is in that shared document, it is submitted; no eLC upload is needed. Grades remain in eLC.

Use the course schedule for deadlines. All groups submit both deliverables before their section’s class on November 10, 2026 — 11:35 a.m. or 2:55 p.m. Eastern, including groups presenting on November 12 or 17. Rehearse with a timer before your class presentation.

The syllabus’s academic honesty, AI-use, and late-work policies apply. Graduate/honors students also complete the separate individual case-analysis project described in the syllabus; that additional work doesn’t replace either group deliverable.

Source: Fall 2026 course syllabus — Final Group Project, reviewed October 13, 2026 and reconciled with John’s current instructions. Current requirements and deadlines are maintained on this course site.