Blog Post 12 Kate Alexander We are in the home stretch! After a great meeting on Monday we were able to sort through how the report is going to be structured and what our major topics are versus our subtopics. A face to face with Tyler helped us to hone in on some important topics that we want to make sure we cover, and how to present them. The big takeaway is to make sure that there’s data to support all of our observations and recommendations to YPO. We’re getting some paperwork from YPO that will help us in developing... Continue reading

Blog Post 11: 4/7/2019 Kate Alexander This week has been mostly about coordinating data. We met Monday evening to go through the analysis of all of our interviews. During the meeting we discussed the insights everyone had collected, what patterns we were seeing, where we would like to add more details, and what questions we still had that merited looking back through the transcripts. I personally am compiling the graphs and comparisons we need to support our claims and recommendations. Since a similar project was done with this group through Xavier, we asked our point of contact what information or... Continue reading

Blog Post 10: 3/31/2019 Kate Alexander This week has been all about analysis and organizing data. We have completed our insights spreadsheet and gone through the interviews. We have also created an insights outline to start formulating more concise ideas and break up the information into more readable sections. This will hopefully make it easier to convert our data into the final paper for the end of the semester. I personally have been looking through the data to create usable tables and graphs for display and to find trends. My approach to this has been to seek out broader topics... Continue reading

Blog Post 9: 3/24/2019 Kate Alexander Another week down and we have officially wrapped up interviews and are all into insight development. Everyone has divided up the interviews to go through transcripts and notes in order to pull significant points that we would like to discuss in the final report. To track these points and see if there are any trends that arise we have created a spreadsheet with the subjects that we choose a couple weeks ago that everyone has been filling out this week. We have also created a folder for detailed notes from the interviews that everyone... Continue reading

Blog Post 8: 3/17/2019 This week has wrapped up our in person interviews for YPO. We do have a few stragglers that we will be conducting phone interviews with, but at this point we have completed 40 interviews which is twice the number of interviews that YPO expected us to be able to complete in this time. Now it’s down the rabbit hole into full on analysis. Our goal this week is to wrap up transcriptions, which has been divided amongst the group, and start to track the trends that have emerged in order to gain some thoughtful insights for... Continue reading

Blog Post 7: 3/10/2019 Entering the final week of interviews for our Capstone project and it is super exciting. As of now, the count will be at 41 interviews when we are done! It’s been an interesting week because you would think at this point there’s not much new information that we would be getting from these interviews having done so many already, but sure enough a new topic began to emerge and was actually brought up by 3 separate interviews this week. Yet another interesting insight that we are excited to delve into. Transcriptions and insight development is coming... Continue reading

Kate Alexander Blog Post 6: 3/4/2019 We had a productive start to the week, holding a meeting as a team and then being joined by our YPO contact, Tyler, to go over what’s been done and set up additional checkpoint dates for the next phases of our project. So far, YPO is very happy with our progress and how many interviews we’ve been able to conduct. At this point we’re looking to end with about 40 interviews (over half the members) by March 19th. After this we will focus solely on analysis and building insights for our final report. Our... Continue reading

Blog Post 5 Kate Alexander 2/25/2019 Exciting things are happening this week. We got our second list of YPO members to interview and we’ve already gotten a lot of great responses back. We are currently at 32 interviews done or booked, we have 7 members that we’re setting up times with, and only 11 that haven’t responded yet out of the 50. Best news is that we are still 3 weeks away from our original goal date to be done with interviewing and we’ve already surpassed our interview goal. Since we have had so much success, we are getting started... Continue reading

Kate Alexander Blog Post 4: 2/17/2019 Another week has passed and we’re making steady progress in the interviews for YPO. We’re 12 interviews in, with 8 more scheduled, which brings us to a total of 20 so far. This is great news, because this was our minimum interview goal for the project! With this many interviews completed, we can start looking for insights and getting a leg up on the analysis of our work so far. We will still try to see the remaining 11 members, who have all been contacted once already, and will send out a second e-mail... Continue reading

Blog Post 3: Kate Alexander Quick reminder, I am in the YPO group and we are working on interviewing members of the YPO organization in order to gain a better understanding of their experiences and see what improvements can be made to enhance the value of their membership. This week was filled with interviewing. We were able to see 7 YPO members and start to get some great insights into what’s working in the organization and what could be improved upon. After the first few interviews, we made a couple of tweaks to our questions. One of the tweaks just... Continue reading

Sorry for the late update guys. The week has been off to a busy start! We met with our contact, Tyler, to go over deliverables and get a little bit more in depth about YPO and some of the events and inner workings of the organization, which was very helpful. We set up a weekly summary e-mail that we will be sending him in regards to our interviews and progress, and we will be meeting with him at the end of the interview process before we go into analysis. As far as the interviews go, our first round starts Thursday... Continue reading

Hello everyone! My capstone assignment is to work with Drew Boyd to find potential growth and expansion opportunities for the 1819 Innovation Hub. I had my first meeting with Drew last Tuesday and a lunch meeting with my clients, David Adams, the Chief Innovation Officer and CEO of UC Research Institute, and Myrita Crag, the Assistant Vice President of the Office of Innovation to go over the details of the project. Thursday was my first time visiting the 1819 Innovation Hub, and David and Drew took me on a tour of the entire building, explaining the purpose of each floor.... Continue reading

Blog Post 1- Kate Alexander Hi Everyone, So we’re a couple weeks in to Capstone and so far so good for the most part. Our group is working with YPO (Young Presidents Organization), which is an exclusive leadership group designed for young CEOs and presidents (Under 50 years) to network, learn and support each other. Our primary focus will be on the members from the Cincinnati chapter, who we will be interviewing to gain a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of the organization in order to help guide YPO in the future. The result will hopefully be insight... Continue reading

Hello everyone! I’m working on my capstone project alongside Heather McIntyre. We ended up recruiting our client, Olga Yurovski. She’s the CEO and founder of Shopperations, which is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that offers cloud-based collaborative planning and budgeting tools for marketing professionals in the Consumer Packaged Goods/Consumer Electronics industries. Heather and I have been working very hard already to get things done in time. We finalized our Project Charter last week, and have been sticking to our deadlines. We created a very specific timeline with the tasks we need to get done in order to better layout the project,... Continue reading

For my capstone, I am working with SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking). Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, I am now handed a new challenge of working with a client internationally. I have never worked with a client internationally, but I look forward to the learning experience. Time change has been an adjustment and will continue to be. The focus of our project is an industry I am familiar with on a personal level, and the changes have been very obvious over the last ten years. This will be interesting to view on a professional, in depth level. I look forward to... Continue reading

Casey Lysaght and I met with Lt. Elliott of the UC Police Department on Thursday evening. I was already very excited about the project but after meeting with him I was even more motivated. I think Lt. Elliott has a great objective in mind for the project but there is very little detail and parameter around it. This is exciting for us but also challenging. It is exciting because as he was speaking I know that Casey and I both saw so much opportunity. There is literally so much we could do with this project. I immediately thought of their... Continue reading

So my partner and I, Cassie, met with Lori Levy last week in the Short Vine Business District area for the first time. They hold their meetings at the Police substation on the corner there. Aside from Lori, we met with the entire committee who is in charge of making the Short Vine business district what it is. This included, along with Lori (who owns Ladder 19), John, Michael and Franz. Everyone was extremely friendly in this first meeting and I believe it went exceptionally well. We talked about the problems that currently exist within the Short Vine Business District.... Continue reading

So far, Taylor Conlkin's and my project feels like it is off to a great start. We had our initial meeting with our client at the Healthcare Connection, Solimar, last week and are scheduled for a quick phonecall tomorrow with her for a few more follow-ups. THCC is a great organization and one that I really believe in and want to help, which makes working on this project that much more motivating. I think Taylor and I will be faced a few very unique challenges on this project just by nature of THCC's clientele. Half of all patients require a... Continue reading

When we initially met with our clients I honestly had little idea what to expect. By nature our client, Procter and Gamble, is intimidating with their high status in not only Cincinnati, but the world. We also had only received one of the two potential assignments so preparation seemed limited. But as the nature of our project and innovation methodology suggests, the constraint of ambiguity allowed me to go in completely open minded with no preconceived notion of the assignment specifics. I ended up on the project we had not previously heard much about, so a lot of my research... Continue reading

The very first blow. It came as a surprise to me that I would be working alone on the Capstone project. It made me quite scared. Honestly speaking I do not have any fear of not getting the work done individually or even lacking in creative ideas for the project. I am just scared of one thing and that is the fact that in moments of anxiousness and uncertainties I would be all alone. I would not have anyone by my side, being as nervous as I am before meetings or project reviews or giving me confidence about my approach... Continue reading

Prior to registering for Capstone, I heard nothing bur negative things. "Your life is over", "Say goodbye to your weekends", "I hope you get a good group because mine wasn't" and "If you don't get a A, you get a F". Of course, after hearing these great things about Capstone, I began doubting myself. I am taking 20 credit hours this semester, working a full time job and I don't know if I can succeed. After getting my group assignment and mildly stalking my partner and our organization, I felt a little better. Hannah looked like a hard worker and... Continue reading

Okay, well, here I go again. By that, I mean, I am starting another big project for a degree program. Back when I was an undergraduate in mechanical engineering, we had a year long senior design project. And, to be honest, everyone talked about how much work that would be, but my senior design project ended up not being that bad. That was where my head was when I walked into our first Capstone class two weeks ago - this won't be that hard. Then Drew told us about A students who failed Capstone. And I started to get rather... Continue reading

The Capstone Experience begins January 7, 2013. I want to welcome a new group of students and a new group of clients. Watch here for the latest insights and key learnings from students as they tackle this incredibly difficult challenge. Continue reading

We had a meeting last week with our client. We are getting a clear understanding of exactly where this project is going through our charter. But even so, I get the feeling that I’m lost in a confusing world of marketing terms to know where to go. The marketing terms I know, and if I struggle to remember them I can always reference any number of sources but where you truly start on a project is difficult. The Big Picture framework is wonderful but in Marketing Strategy the research was already completed and I just had to know, which lever... Continue reading

Our first two conference calls have gone well and Mayur and I look forward to working with our company Goal Success (http://www.goalsuccess.com/) on their marketing plan. One challenge for us is that the company is based in San Diego, CA, which means lots of conference calls and most likely Skype as well. Our client had mentioned that he does a large amount of traveling though and that he could possibly fly in to Cincinnati to meet with us and receive our final recommendations at the end of the project. This was exciting to me as it showed how interested our... Continue reading