BBA Capstone Requirement

Students must elect at least one required capstone course in the Winter term* of their Senior year in the BBA program. Capstone courses make connections between academic learning and the professional world; they include topics that address complex concepts, require diverse skills and perspectives, and are relevant to future professional endeavors. Some capstone courses also include an Action-Based Learning (ABL) component, allowing students to have a direct interaction with a client/stakeholder and a deliverable product that integrates learning and analysis and applies it to a real-world situation. Most capstone courses are three credits. Students can discuss their course selection and planning for a capstone course with their academic advisor. Grades in capstone courses will be distributed according to the elective distribution guidelines.  Students can access the archive of previous course syllabi via the Kresge Library database for historical information on each capstone.

The dates and times for capstone ranking will be posted here soon. Students may submit their rankings at any point during the ranking window. Capstone ranking results will be available for viewing shortly after ranking closes. The ranking system may be accessed on iMpact and a link will be posted once it becomes available. More information on the Capstone ranking process can be found on the Senior Registration page on iMpact.

Current* Capstone Courses

*Capstone course offerings are subject to change each semester.

Professional Capstones

Capstone Action-Based Learning

Capstone Research/Thesis

Capstone Fund Course

ES 402 – Zell Early Stage Fund (requires prior completion of ES 401, and enrollment in Senior Winter)

Professional Capstones

ACC 418

*Information for Winter 2026

  • Course Description 
  • Course Information Handout
  • Skills Gained: Include mapping firms’ business strategy to the information in their financial statements; methodically evaluating catalysts for firms’ financial performance; constructing robust business forecasts of fundamental drivers of future performance and value; calculating firms’ intrinsic values.
  • Final Deliverable(s): A complete financial statement analysis of a publicly traded company.

Additional Information Provided by Faculty: The course presents an integrative framework for business analysis, business forecasting, and equity valuation using quantitative and qualitative financial information. In this important Capstone course, you will gain a rigorous understanding of the conceptual interdependencies between the various business theories you have been exposed to in other courses (for example, strategy, accounting, finance) and how to apply these concepts to make practical, real-world business decisions.

For example, we introduce state-of-the-art data analytics tools to analyze a firm’s financial performance to date, forecast its future performance and estimate its intrinsic value implied by these financial forecasts. Furthermore, we study the relation between a firm’s business strategy and accounting numbers reported in financial statements, illustrate the latest techniques and information sources used by Wall Street professionals, discuss the impact of global and domestic economic trends on financial ratios used in performance evaluation, review the effect of managerial talent on the future financial success of a business, and learn how to convert qualitative data into quantitative value estimates.

This Capstone course includes real-world, action-based learning, cases that demonstrate the process of integrating various business theories and large amounts of data in an applied manner. For example, you will engage in a “live” forecasting exercise where students forecast a company’s future quarterly performance. This project will involve retrieving real-time data about the industry, company, management plans, and analyst opinions, and apply the theoretical business analysis framework to construct financial forecasts. Once the company announces its financial results, we critically examine the reasons for any deviations between the forecasted and actual numbers.

As a final Capstone learning experience, students are engaged in a comprehensive final project. This project will require students to demonstrate the practical integration of several business disciplines to make an investment decision. This project has a written component as well as a short presentation in which the students demonstrate their ability to communicate complex business information in an effective manner.

The Financial Statement Analysis course is suitable for anyone pursuing careers in finance, consulting, accounting and is a must-take Capstone course for anyone interested in pursuing a career in the business world!

**Please note: It is strongly advised that students complete ACC 312 prior to enrolling in this course, or enroll concurrently in both courses.**

BL 404

*Information for Winter 2026 

Additional Information Provided by Faculty: Law provides entrepreneurs with many opportunities to gain a competitive advantage. This course offers an examination of various legal issues every entrepreneur should understand to make good business decisions. This includes topics such as legal concerns that arise when leaving your current employer to start a business, creating an appropriate ownership structure, funding the venture, negotiating and contracting with vendors and customers, assembling your team, and global issues. This course utilizes case studies and explores real-world examples in order to explore these legal issues in depth. This course will also assist you in your ability to select and to work with legal counsel.

Teaching methods include lecture, case study, and projects to provide simulated hands-on experiences relevant to start-ups.

BL 405

*Information for Winter 2026 

Additional Information Provided by Faculty: This course focuses on conflict and conflict resolution in corporate America by providing students with both a theoretical and practical framework to help them negotiate conflict in their professional and personal lives. The course includes theoretical readings exploring topics such as sources of conflict, distributive justice, dealing with implicit bias in conflict, alternative dispute resolution, workplace and organizational conflict, ethics of conflict resolution, and others. There will also be a significant practical component to the course where students will have the opportunity to explore, discuss, and resolve conflicts in a classroom setting.

Teaching modes include lecture, group discussion, simulations, and guest speakers with significant expertise in aspects of conflict and conflict resolution. This capstone course is designed to be interactive and will afford students the opportunity to connect with the material in meaningful and creative ways.

As a capstone learning experience, students are engaged in a semester-long comprehensive group project that challenges students to critically evaluate a model conflict and engage their analytical and practical skills to facilitate a resolution to that conflict. There will be benchmarks throughout the semester that will allow students to demonstrate their mastery of the concepts and skills taught in the course.

Please note: There are no prerequisites to this course and it is not necessary that you have taken previous negotiation or conflict resolution courses to enroll in this course. However, students who have taken similar courses such as BL 410 are encouraged to enroll in this course as the material covered will serve to supplement your prior coursework quite well.

ES 414

*Information for Winter 2026 
**Students cannot get credit for this course if they have already completed ENTR 411.

Additional Information Provided by Faculty:

Why take this course?

The ability to think and act like an entrepreneur is absolutely essential if one wants to create real value. This is true not only for startup founders & employees, but also for large-company employees & executives.

Whether you plan to start a company, work for a startup, or join a large organization, ES 414 will provide you with valuable tools and skills to help you succeed. Through a combination of action-based learning (e.g., team and individual projects, in-class exercises, etc.) and traditional pedagogy (e.g., discussions, lectures, guest speakers, etc.), you will learn how to:

Identify and validate significant unmet needs; Generate innovative solutions that address those needs; Develop viable business models; Decide if/when to raise external capital; Foster an entrepreneurial mindset; and more.

Most importantly, you will gain a deeper understanding of how to create value for your customers, for others within your value chain, for your company, and for yourself.

ES 414 requires creativity, resourcefulness, and hard work. Our goal is to make it a rewarding experience – providing useful knowledge & skills that will serve you well throughout your life and career.

Should I take this course? YES, if you might one day…

  • Start a business;
  • Work for an existing startup;
  • Work for a large company, and want to use innovation to help: fuel the company’s growth and fast track your career.

FIN 430

*Information for Winter 2026

  • Course Description
  • Skills Gained: see description below
  • Final Deliverable(s): see description below

How do startups raise capital, structure deals, and create value? How do investors decide which ventures to back, and how do they make money doing so? This course takes you inside the world of entrepreneurial finance, equipping students with a deep understanding of venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) through both analytical frameworks and hands-on experience.

In the first half of the course, students will act as venture capitalists, evaluating early-stage companies and learning to assess investment opportunities through valuation, deal structuring, governance, and exit strategies. The centerpiece of this section is an investment memo project, where teams analyze a real startup and prepare a pitch to convince fellow General Partners that the opportunity will generate returns. In the second half, the focus shifts to private equity and leveraged buyouts. Teams will develop a comprehensive LBO plan for a public company, including target identification, financing strategy, operational improvements, and exit planning.

Students will engage in case discussions, analyze real-world deals, and interact with leading investors and entrepreneurs through a robust guest speaker series featuring active venture capitalists and PE professionals.

  • Skills Gained
    • Valuing entrepreneurial ventures and structuring VC/PE deals
    • Analyzing term sheets, cap tables, and deal structures
    • Understanding incentives and governance in private capital markets
    • Developing investment memos and LBO models
    • Presenting and defending investment proposals
  • Final Deliverables
    • Team investment memo and pitch presentation
    • Team LBO plan and pitch presentation
    • Midterm exam
    • Guest speaker reflections and current event presentations

MKT 470

*Information for Winter 2026

An organization’s performance on social and environmental responsibility can influence its reputation, its ability to attract and retain employees and customers, its relationships with its stakeholders, its economic performance, and even its ability to attract investors.

This course will cover interactions between society and marketing and marketing’s role and responsibility (in both environmental and social issues) in society. We will take a triple bottom line (People, Planet, Profit) perspective when evaluating these interactions. As such, the impact of social and environmental concerns on marketing actions, consumer behavior and company performance will be discussed in detail. Diverse perspectives from business ethics, strategy, economics, psychology, and sociology will help students adopt different lenses while analyzing a complex array of contemporary marketing issues. We will be using case studies throughout the course and students will have the opportunity to work collaboratively with peers and to discuss a broad set of interesting topics. Course topics will include Social Sustainability, Environmental Sustainability, Consumer Attitudes toward Sustainable Marketing, Social Influences on Responsible Consumer Behavior, Corporate Social & Environmental Initiatives, Marketing & AI, Brand Activism, and Brand Purpose.

By the end of this course, students will gain a deep understanding of the core concepts, strategies, and practices of socially and environmentally responsible marketing. They will be able to identify different stakeholders, assess situational factors that surround a company and analyze the consequences of a company’s marketing decisions in terms of their social, environmental, and economic impact. In the process, students will improve their analytical and integrative thinking skills.

Note: MKT 470 is approved as an elective for the Erb Undergraduate Fellows program curriculum. Ross students who are Erb Fellows can get this course counted towards the 12 credits coursework requirement.

MO 437

*Information for Winter 2026

  • Course Description
  • Skills Gained: strengthened skills and confidence in your ability to lead from any seat, skillfully requesting and synthesizing feedback, analyzing and navigating challenging organizational dynamics, and written and verbal communication
  • Final Deliverable(s): A personal leadership profile of mission, vision, and values. You will have improved your profile iteratively throughout the semester using course content, guided personal reflection, application to live business cases, and feedback from others including senior executives.

Additional Information Provided by Faculty:

Overview
This capstone aims to deepen your mindset and toolset to lead positive change in organizations throughout your career. This course will further your self-awareness through targeted feedback and reflection. You will analyze and integrate inputs to draft your personal leadership framework of mission, vision and values. You will then refine your draft through a series of practical action-learning workshops with diverse, inspiring and effective leaders from all levels of organizational hierarchy. 

The plan of the course
Leadership is performed by many people throughout the organization. It is not the responsibility of a select few titled people. You will be a leader in many situations through your career. As you conclude your degree program, it is important to clarify your leadership profile – your mission, vision, and values – in a way that it is actionable in different contexts. Your leadership profile will then evolve with you as you advance throughout your career. In the first phase of the course, you will gather and integrate structured feedback. The inputs will inform your draft leadership profile. In the middle phase of the course, you will be invited to engage in “live cases” with four diverse, inspiring and effective leaders from different career stages. Each is trying to advance a social innovation. You will learn both from the individuals and their initiatives. As you learned in MO300, initiatives can be of several types: products (selling goods and services whose value extends beyond profit), practices (making how we do it more sustainable), people (making the workplace more just and rewarding), and public (building the community beyond the walls of the institution).

In the final phase of the course, you will gather and integrate a further round of structured feedback. The inputs will help you refine your draft leadership profile. We will conclude by revisiting your most important learning points of the semester. We will support you in the behavioral change required to turn insights into action in your own career and life.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. Understand the elements of a personal leadership profile: your Mission, Vision and Values.
  • Understand the different components and their respective use cases.
  • Apply the concepts in practice by drafting a Personal Leadership Profile. 
  1. Seek out and interpret qualitative and quantitative inputs to refine your personal leadership profile.
    • Build self-awareness through feedback and structured reflection. 
    • Learn from the experience of others: diverse leaders who have put their mission, vision, and values into action in the workplace. 
    • Test drive your personal leadership profile in action by role-playing live case scenarios: make recommendations to advance both organizational objectives and broader social impact. 
  1. Synthesize a complex data set to create an actionable plan for personal growth and impact. 
    • Strengthen your ability to perceive opportunities for impact by deepening your ability to identify and categorize social innovations.
    • Analyze feedback while demonstrating self-awareness and growth mindset to refine Personal Leadership Profile and development plan.
    • Learn and apply a framework for sustainable behavior change.
    • Integrate learnings and build persuasive communication skills through presentations to classmates and business executives.

TO 412

*Information for Winter 2026

Additional Information Provided by Faculty: 
Course Overview: The need to access, gather, manage and analyze data has become an essential part of any business decision process.  Whether working in finance, marketing, or consulting, the ability to combine specific discipline knowledge with advanced data tools is clearly a sought after skill.  In this course students learn how to work with large data sets in order to derive business insights in a variety of business disciplines.  To do so, students get hands-on practice with a number of software tools that are often used by companies to access, manage, visualize and explore real data in a range of business contexts.

Tools Taught: This course teaches basic tools used for the acquisition, management, and visualization of large data sets.  Students learn how to:

  • Create, manage, and query databases via SQL;
  • Quickly construct insightful visualizations of multi-attribute data using Tableau;
  • Use the Python programming language to manage data as well as connect to APIs to efficiently acquire public data (e.g., from Twitter).

Unique Setup: This course includes a large portion of hands-on work.  After learning new material in a lecture, students will work in teams during class time on an assigned list of tasks.  A final team project will enable students to integratively apply all the covered tools to a real-world context.

Programming: As the so-called digital economy grows, there is a growing need for analysts and managers who can either code by themselves, or understand enough of coding to have meaningful conversations with their programmers.  TO 412 is a great introduction to programming.

Who Should Take This Course? The tools and concepts taught in this course would be very useful for students going into consulting, marketing, product management, and business analytics.  Students going into these jobs will be expected to know how to retrieve data from companies’ databases and then query and analyze the data in order to make the right business decisions.  This course teaches students how to approach situations requiring the use of data, how to acquire the needed data, query it, and present the results visually in a way that is easy to communicate to other managers.

TO 433

*Information for Winter 2024

  • Course Description
  • Course Syllabus
  • Skills Gained: Course aims to provide students with a conceptual introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a broad understanding of AI’s basic techniques, how AI is applied to problems, future applications of AI, and an awareness of the challenges, risks, and ethical considerations of use of AI in business. Essentially, this is the course to ensure that you don’t lose your job to an AI.
  • Final Deliverable(s): A group project report.

Artificial intelligence has become part of our lives – even more so now with tools like ChatGPT becoming an integral part of our lives. The speed that AI is being researched, developed, and applied in various contexts (e.g., decision-making, manufacturing, service) is breathtaking. In this course we ask a simple question: “AI will create value. How will you capture any of that value?” AI technologies and applications will be even more important in the future for individuals, businesses and other organizations as they drive innovation, save costs, increase quality for products and services, and simply become part of daily life for humans. AI has a great promise for individuals, organizations and societies. AI based products, services and tools will not only be an advantage for businesses but a necessity to remain competitive in the future. At the same time there are considerable risks and unsolved implications such as reduction in employment, responsibility determination when AI fails (e.g., crash of a self-driving car, a wrong disease diagnosis) and ethical dilemmas (e.g., a patient death, automatic missile launch). Future business leaders need to understand and leverage AI while mitigating its threats. AI4B course prepares you for an AI driven future.

TO 435/BE 435

*Information for Winter 2026

  • Course Description: Behavioral economics combines lessons from psychology and economics to study how people process information and make decisions as employees, managers, and consumers. Behavioral operations management applies those insights to managing business operations. These fields have provided an understanding of how people’s decisions deviate from “optimal” (rational and selfish) choices, as well as the consequences of such deviations in management and the marketplace. This course is devoted to understanding the nature, causes and implications of these deviations. We will then consider how (a) managers and policy makers can intervene to improve decision making and outcomes and (b) how markets are organized around exploiting or remedying deviations from rational decision-making.
  • Course Syllabus
  • Skills Gained: This course has three main objectives for skills development. First, after completing this course, students will be able to identify when a behavioral factor we discuss may influence their own or others’ decisions; and will understand why a policy, process or market has been instituted around that factor. Second, this course will improve the abilities of the student (as a future manager) to influence the behavior of others (co-workers, consumers, etc.), particularly by identifying ways to intervene to encourage better decisions and better outcomes. Similarly, will empower students with easy-to-apply tools to recognize biases in and improve their own decision-making. Third, this course will improve students’ intuitive empirical abilities and biased decisions. In learning about the foundation behavioral research the course elucidate how we know what we know, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of new ideas in the workplace.
  • Final Deliverable(s): Design an Intervention to Solve a Societal/Managerial Problem; the Final Project allows students to apply the behavioral concepts they learned to a societal/managerial setting of interest. The professor will introduce and provide context for a broad problem area. Groups (3-4 students) will identify a specific problem within that space and develop a behavioral intervention to solve that problem. A central part of this project is to develop an argument for why their proposal should be implemented by the relevant stakeholders. Groups must research their specific setting (within the broader problem area) in detail, define the problem to be addressed, describe their proposed intervention, provide a brief review of past research that gave rise to the proposed intervention, and describe the methods that are proposed for evaluating the effectiveness of the intervention. This year the problem area will be using behavioral interventions to promote environmental sustainability.

Additional Information Provided by Faculty:

Behavioral Economics uses what we know about psychology and behavior to develop new tools to improved decision making and change outcomes for consumers, employees and organizations. Behavioral Operations Management applies those insights to the core value creating activities of firms and organizations. You may be familiar with some of these ideas if you have read Thinking Fast and Slow, listened to Freakonomics Radio, or have heard of “nudging.”

Using behavioral insights has been a growing trend in business and government. Major companies like Google, Amazon, Uber, and PwC have developed internal behavioral insights teams to transform their practices. Behavioral consulting firms such as BEworks and Ideas42 help even more companies test and implement behavioral interventions. New companies like Lemonade, Humu and Applied have been built from the ground up to leverage these ideas to create value. This course will give students the tools and frameworks to apply behavioral insights for themselves and their organizations to make real change.

This course consists of introducing core behavioral concepts, and then showing how they can be used to change behavior. We will be very applied – showing students examples of real organizations making successful and impactful behavioral interventions – to give students a toolbox for their future careers. We will also see how these behavioral forces shape markets – both from firms trying to take advantage of our biases, and trying to provide us solutions. This course will also be very integrative, drawing on much of what students have learned at Ross – especially psychology, economics and operations.

For example, we will discuss:

  • Why we procrastinate and how to make a habit that sticks
  • How overconfidence leads to bad plans and bad investments, and what to do about it
  • Why we care more about losses than gains – and how this shapes incentives
  • How firms sell us self-control, take advantage of our inattention, and get us to compromise our privacy

The final project presents students with a broad problem area of societal/managerial importance, and asks students to identify a specific problem within that space to address using a behavioral intervention. This year the problem area will be using behavioral interventions to promote environmental sustainability – this can encompass a range of behaviors as consumers, and/or as firms. Students will draw on the concepts from the course to identify the underlying behavioral drivers, propose a solution to change behavior, and consider how their solution could be implemented and evaluated. Students will need to develop an argument for why their proposal will be successful, and why it should be implemented by the relevant stakeholders. This will equip students with tools to immediately use behavioral insights to make an impact on their future firms and organizations.

TO 465 (Management Consulting Capstone)

*Information for Winter 2026

  • Course Description
  • Course Information Handout
  • Course Syllabus (Winter 2026)
  • Skills Gained: Integrative Top Management Problem Solving, Executive Level Communications, Consulting Project Management and Execution, Business Teamwork and Emotional Intelligence
  • Final Deliverable(s): Business Performance Transformation Strategy and Action Program (in both a Written Memorandum and an Executive Presentation)

Additional Information Provided by Faculty: 

  • Learning Goals: The objective of this course is to help students advance their understanding of management consulting and general management and how to work with senior executives to improve the performance of their organizations, with an emphasis on:
    • Problem solving from a top-management perspective, drawing upon the full BBA curriculum, including strategy, marketing, operations, organization, accounting, and finance to develop recommendations focused on driving improvements in strategic and financial performance, as well as to provide a great place to work for their employees and to be leaders in environmental sustainability
    • Interpersonal skills required to be an effective business professional, including conducting interviews, facilitating workshops, leading team meetings, and delivering as an effective team member
    • Oral and written communications skills, including asking insightful questions, listening actively, crafting logical arguments, writing persuasive reports, and delivering engaging presentations
  • Class Format: The course is an action-based learning capstone in which students experience a management consulting engagement from initial problem scoping to presentation of final recommendations. Students are organized into consulting teams engaged to assist the leaders of Velocity Avionics as they seek to accelerate the performance of their aerospace business in the face of ongoing opportunities and challenges facing their customers throughout the world, including Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, and the major airlines and aircraft maintenance companies. The case unfolds in real time, beginning in January 2026, with the students conducting in-person interviews with Velocity’s senior executives, assessing internal company information, evaluating publicly available industry research, and analyzing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They engage with executives throughout the assignment, culminating in the presentation of their recommendations to the Velocity Executive Leadership Team in April. They work together in self-directed teams to define and scope problems, gather and analyze information on the market, customers, and competitors, develop and conduct a workshop, develop and evaluate recommendations, and craft and deliver communications. They are encouraged and expected to lever AI in all aspects of their work, as they will do when they enter the workforce upon graduation. The instructor serves as their engagement director, as well as their coach and advisor, helping them build their problem-solving capabilities, team member and leadership skills, and communications effectiveness. The classroom comes to life as a real project team environment where students learn by doing and experience how a consulting engagement is scoped, managed, and delivered by leading management consulting firms. 
  • Who should take this class? This capstone is a great choice for students intending to enter the consulting profession, whether veterans of a consulting firm internship or exploring consulting for the first time. It is also a great fit for students interested in general management. International exchange students are welcome!

Capstone Action-Based Learning

BA 453

*Information for Winter 2026

  • Course Description
  • Skills Gained: See course description.
  • Final Deliverable(s): A presentation to your sponsor. 

Additional Information Provided by Faculty: Capstone MAP gives students the chance to work as a team on a hands-on project for a real-world company using a wide range of business skills and critical thinking.  Projects are sponsored by established companies, startups, and nonprofit organizations.  Guided by top Ross faculty members, students conduct original research, develop workable recommendations, and present their results to company executives.  The challenge is difficult, the work is real, and the experience is irreplaceable.

This course will help students refine the skills necessary to succeed in the workplace by empowering student teams to work independently, design their own schedules, and deliver results for real companies.  BA 453 will teach students to effectively design and organize projects, extract valuable information from multiple resources, and ultimately deliver productive and impactful solutions.  This course is a must-take for any student looking to nail future work projects and add value in their first professional role.

After enrolling, you’ll have the opportunity to bid for projects from a wide variety of sectors, including Real Estate, Energy, Transportation, Media, Non-profit, Start-ups, and many more. You can also request projects that focus on a variety of disciplines, including finance, marketing, strategy, operations, etc.

Most teams will have three touch points with Executives from their sponsor company: at the beginning, middle, and end of the project.  After some initial training at the beginning of the course, student teams will be responsible for working autonomously to complete their project with weekly meetings with their faculty advisor.

Take this class if you want to:

  • Have a well-rounded experience that involves using your knowledge from marketing, strategy, and other core courses
  • Work outside the classroom on your own schedule
  • Make an impact in a local company or nonprofit
  • Develop translatable consulting experience
  • Network with others on campus and in your sponsor organization

Here is a sample of the projects that will be available for the upcoming semester. The full portfolio of approximately 18 projects for Winter 2026 will be available for project ranking shortly after the Thanksgiving break.

To learn more, check out How My Ross Capstone Taught Me To Design With Purpose.

Capstone Research/Thesis

BA 480

*Information for Fall 2024/Winter 2025

Additional Information: The Senior Thesis Seminar is a six-credit, honors-type seminar that requires enrollment in both the Fall and Winter terms of Senior year, for 3.0 credits in each term. Thus, students interested in writing the research thesis to fulfill their capstone requirement should begin planning for this during Junior year to ensure adequate time to register for the course in both Fall and Winter terms of Senior year. Feel free to review the BA 480 Senior Capstone Thesis Information Session materials for more details.

Capstone Fund Courses

ES 402

Additional Notes

The following courses are approved capstone courses but may not be offered in Winter 2026: BE 410, BL 407, FIN 422, MO 468, and STRATEGY 492.
The following courses no longer meet the capstone requirement (term listed indicates last term course was offered as a capstone): TO 482 (FA17) MKT 401 (WN18), MO 463 (WN18), MKT 430 (WN23), FIN 403 (WN24), ACC/FIN 338 (WN25), BA 457 (WN25), and ES 403 (WN25).