Public Affairs 5620: Rapid Innovation for Public Impact

The class is an intense professional experience for 4 credits. Students should expect to spend up to 12 hours/week cumulative during class time and outside of class time. This course is designed to provide students with hands-on experience understanding and working with federal, state, and local public sector agencies or nonprofits on real, current problems. In so doing, the students help organizations better address their missions and emerging threats, challenges, and opportunities. The course provides students with human-centered design and Innovation tools to solve complex problems and grow as young professionals.

Our goal, within the constraints of a course and a limited amount of time during a semester, is to provide a framework for testing students’ hypotheses in order to design solutions, while emulating all of the pressures and demands of the real world in early-stage innovation. The intent is for urgency and good enough decision-making to become ingrained. Students learn how to work and collaborate on a team, handle uncertain and chaotic environments, and turn a creative idea into a solution for a real-world complex problem that is challenging a government or nonprofit agency. Students learn how to interview a wide range of stakeholders (customer discovery), practice evidence-based innovation (human-centered design and agile development), and use a business model tool to validate the solution’s viability. Students ‘get out of the classroom’ to see whether anyone other than them would want or use the solution. 

At the conclusion of this course, students will possess a deep understanding of complex problems in the public sector. Specifically, students will demonstrate:

• An understanding of the public sector and its dynamics
• A profound understanding of the assigned sponsor’s and beneficiary’s needs, problem, and workflow, and an ability to clarify the problem-statement 
• Rapid iteration or agile development of products or solutions that are technically feasible, desirable, and viable in an economic and organizational sense. 
• An understanding of all relevant customers, stakeholders, deployment issues, costs, resources, and ultimate value of the minimum viable solution. 
• A facility with complex problem-solving methodology, innovation tools, and fundamental leadership skills, valuable throughout a professional career. 
• Engaged Citizenship & Intercultural Competency: Students consider public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social environmental, and economic factors in applying engineering design to produce solutions meeting specified needs. 
• Personal and Professional Development: Students individually assess and pursue personal and professional growth in concert with project requirements and personal career goals. 
• Cultivate Engineering Mindset: Students develop an engineering mindset that demonstrates constant curiosity, makes connections between disparate bodies of information, and seeks opportunities to create value 

Rigorous class preparation includes students investing consistently some amount of time on an almost daily basis, like professionals do. Taking written notes during Class, Office Hours, Interviews, and other Feedback sessions is highly recommended. A course handout details the suggested time-budget for a typical week in order to keep the workload reasonable and in-line with the number of course credit-hours. Student responsibilities include:

• Reviewing any assigned videos or readings listed in the course website.
• Interviewing (either individually or as a team) several stakeholders/week in order to test hypotheses about the problem and potential solutions.
• Participating in one weekly mandatory consultation (office hour) to review progress and identify obstacles.
• Preparing and presenting a 10-minute team briefing typically every other Friday that covers the solution’s evolving design and other topics specified in the course website. 
• Delivering a brief written status report on the Fridays without team presentations that summarizes the week’s hypothesis-testing and progress.
• Attending ALL classes, briefing the team presentation, providing critical peer-feedback to other teams, and formulating hypotheses and interview strategy for the coming week. 

By the semester’s end:

• Each team conducts dozens of quality stakeholder interviews.
• Each team delivers a solution, final video (not to exceed 2 minutes), presentation (not to exceed 10 minutes), and written report (no fewer than 3 pages and no more than 5 pages, excluding cover page, references, and appendices) concerning the solution developed to meet the sponsor’s needs. 
• Graduate students deliver individually a brief, additional personal reflections paper.

This course is interdisciplinary and team-based, therefore 70% of a student’s final grade will come from the team’s performance. Teammates will help assess individual contributions. Graduate students will be graded to a more rigorous standard and will have an additional two-page written assignment to be delivered before end of semester. 

30% Team’s Weekly Performance evident in:

• In-class Oral Presentation quality, demonstrating critical thinking, communication skills, learning, and creativity.
• Written Status Report quality, demonstrating information-synthesis, critical thinking, and communication skills.
• Achieving the assigned number of interviews, a reflection of effort to ‘get out of the building’ for customer discovery or validation, demonstrating customer-focus, curiosity, hypothesis-formulation and -testing, and applied critical thinking.

30% Individual’s Engagement reflected in: 

• Class Participation demonstrating completion of assignments, active listening and attentiveness, commitment to team, and perseverance. 
• Teammates’ peer evaluation of individual’s contributions, reflecting trustworthiness and collaboration skills

40% Team’s 4 FINAL products: the solution, video, oral presentation, and written report