Graduating Students Are An Underutilized Source of Talent

Published on INFORMS OR/MS Today (Joseph Byrum)

Armed with capstone course experience, young minds bring cognitive diversity to the table and help optimize business with open innovation.

The job of an operations research professional is never done. There’s always a better, more optimized way of accomplishing any given business task. One of the more promising routes for achieving greater efficiency is the use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), but creating such a system can be daunting.

It makes sense, then, to explore options for bolstering your organization’s ability to undertake projects of this complexity. Many companies, particularly those in sectors outside of high technology, won’t have the highly specialized skills needed to complete such tasks in-house. So where will they find the talent needed to get the job done? There’s one useful, but underutilized, source of eager talent just waiting for an opportunity to show you what can be done: graduating students armed with capstone course experience.

Firms sitting on large cash reserves won’t see cost as an obstacle. They can just hire a bunch of people and throw manpower at the problem until the project is complete. As long as the final product saves more money than it took to create, the effort would be a success. While effective, such an approach is not particularly efficient. A cheaper and faster route to arrive at what is ultimately a more effective solution is to take advantage of capstone programs to accelerate the development of an AI system, or just about any other complex business optimization effort.

Many top university business and engineering programs require graduating seniors to complete a sophisticated capstone project under the guidance of a corporate sponsor. For students, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the skills they need to excel in their chosen discipline.

Cognitive Diversity

The primary efficiency advantage that students have over domain experts is they bring cognitive diversity to the table. Students aren’t going to know the ins and outs of operations research nor will they have experience in the practical use of algorithms to enhance business productivity – O.R. professionals are always going to beat them on that score. Instead, students come up with ideas and offer a fresh perspective, which is critical for avoiding the groupthink that can sabotage a big project with many moving parts.

When you have diverse teams, the members can draw upon unique backgrounds and experiences to look at problems from multiple angles. While consensus is a great thing in many contexts, when you’re trying to innovate, it’s best to have an array of options from which to choose. “Outside the box” thinking requires cognitive diversity, and true innovation comes by listening to the person who comes up with the approach that nobody else had considered.

Cognitive diversity is harder to achieve when drawing from a pool of employees who all work for the same company. The combined skill sets of those sitting around the table will no doubt be diverse, but corporations tend to hire people who fit into a common corporate culture – they have to in order to be effective. Capstones are effective because they allow a company to capture unique experiences and backgrounds not available in-house.

The students gain just as much from the experience. Instead of working with sample problems or reading textbooks, they’re thrown into an actual business environment, and they have to come up with solutions that work in practice. The success – or sometimes, just as importantly, the failure – they experience is real. It’s hard to imagine a better preparation for the business world. It’s also an audition of sorts, as the most talented students might find a job offer waiting for them after graduation.

Obviously, students aren’t going to execute a massive project all on their own. A skilled project management team needs to guide the capstone process. This includes having domain experts and detail-oriented supervisors keep everything on track so that the final concept can be turned into reality. By far, the most difficult task facing this team is slicing the overall mission into discrete, bite-sized tasks that can be appropriately farmed out. This requires having a vision of the whole project, including where you want to end up, and each and every step required to get there.

Young Minds

A lot of great schools participate in capstone programs, and in my experience, each institution has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. There’s an art to figuring out what school’s program is best suited to which particular task. Some are better at quantitative solutions; others are great at coming up with ideas. Strong project management discipline and team oversight is needed to ensure each task is successfully completed in a way that achieves the larger project goal.

Capstone projects can be put to use in a wide range of tasks. For instance, they can develop and improve business strategies, map out business processes, find pure quantitative solutions to achieving efficiency, and they can even implement solutions with basic computer science. The student teams can work in parallel, or it might make sense to have teams work on the same problem sequentially, with the first team responsible for sketching out a rough approach to a solution that the next team would refine. Each iteration brings the project one step closer to completion.

Don’t underestimate what these young minds can accomplish. They have a habit of outperforming expectations, as INFORMS has found with the outstanding performances at the annual O.R. and Analytics Student Team Competition. Students succeed by putting cognitive diversity to work, and the companies that take advantage of this opportunity can share in that success.