Every year, South Florida's universities produce thousands of hours of serious intellectual work that industry can't access. We align that work with real problems posed by regional companies — solved by cross-disciplinary student teams, funded by modest sponsorship fees and competitive prizes.
Students spend months on projects that are graded and filed. The cross-disciplinary collaboration that real problems require — engineering, business, design working together — rarely happens inside one department, one major, or one rubric.
South Florida's growing corporate base — life sciences, cruise, aerospace, fintech, logistics — has real operational problems and a weak pipeline into regional student talent. Sponsored capstones solve both at once.
A regional company submits a real problem, a sponsorship fee, and a prize budget. The program curates challenges that fit student capabilities and the academic calendar.
Cross-disciplinary student teams — CS, MBA, engineering, design, the sciences — form around challenges that satisfy their capstone requirements in each department.
Teams present to sponsors at an annual showcase. Prizes are awarded, IP transfers under a standing legal framework, and sponsor recruiting conversations begin.
FIU hosts the pilot cohort, contributing faculty champions, capstone integration across engineering, business, and the sciences, and the first generation of cross-disciplinary student teams.
The region's largest not-for-profit healthcare system anchors the clinical and life-sciences vertical, providing real problems, mentor physicians, and a signal of seriousness to other corporates.
Catalytic early funding, civic-innovation convening power, and the institutional credibility that lets the program recruit corporate sponsors across verticals before the sponsorship model is fully self-sustaining.
Access to vetted cross-disciplinary teams working on your real operational problems, with early recruiting visibility on graduates your hiring funnel would otherwise never see.
Cross-disciplinary teamwork, direct exposure to regional employers, and a portfolio piece that looks like professional work — because it is.
Faculty don't have to negotiate sponsored projects one at a time. The program delivers matched, funded, IP-cleared challenges on your academic calendar — with one legal framework across all participating schools.
The program creates a repeatable machine: sponsors post challenges, universities deliver teams, students enter the regional workforce with real industry experience. Every cycle, the region's corporate-academic fabric gets denser.
A regional diagnostics company needed to shorten the time from sample collection to clinician-ready insight without expanding lab headcount, while maintaining regulatory compliance.
A cross-disciplinary FIU team drawn from computer science, biomedical engineering, and the MBA program — matched to the problem and supervised by both faculty capstone advisors and two sponsor mentors.
A workflow-automation pipeline integrating the sponsor's existing LIMS with a triage model, plus a deployment business case with an estimated 40% reduction in review cycles at steady state.
The prototype was validated in the sponsor's pilot lab. Two team members received recruitment offers after graduation. The sponsor returned the following cycle with a second challenge.
Sponsors submit challenges and fees; faculty align them with capstone requirements across participating departments.
Cross-disciplinary student teams form, select challenges, and begin research and scoping with sponsor kickoffs.
Teams iterate with sponsor mentors; mid-point reviews keep work aligned with real industry expectations and timelines.
Demo day with sponsor judging; prizes awarded, IP transferred under the standing framework, recruiting conversations begin.
Pilot cycle at FIU with founding partners and an initial cohort of corporate sponsors.
Expansion to University of Miami or Nova Southeastern, broader sponsor base, more diverse challenges.
Extension north to Florida Atlantic and to Miami Dade College; a standing regional program.
The regional standard for industry-sponsored capstones across South Florida institutions.
South Florida's corporate base spans an unusually diverse set of verticals — each of which produces capstone-scale problems a cross-disciplinary student team can make real progress on in a semester.
OPKO Health, Longeveron, Beckman Coulter Diagnostics
Baptist Health, Jackson Health, Memorial, Nicklaus, UHealth
Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Norwegian, MSC, Virgin Voyages
HEICO, Terran Orbital (Lockheed Martin)
Ryder, ShipMonk, World Kinect, REEF
Citadel, BankUnited, Amerant, MoonPay, Pipe, Intermex
Kaseya, Cloud Software Group, UKG, Magic Leap, ModMed
Lennar, Watsco, MasTec, Related Group, Flow
AutoNation, ODP, Chewy, Bacardi, Celsius, Fresh Del Monte
NextEra / FPL, SBA Communications, Dycom
Every company can access real student intellectual work. Every student can build a portfolio of real industry problems. Every university can be an engine of regional talent. We're recruiting founding corporate sponsors for the first cohort.