What is Capstone Connector?
Capstone Connector is an industry-agnostic center under Innovation Connector. It aims to connect the local community partners with student capstone teams (for now only Computer Science) to solve partners' technological problems by building custom software. It is open to any company, startup, non-profit organization, faculty member, or individual.
Benefits
Capstone Connector aims the collaboration to be beneficial for all stakeholders.
Real Client
The capstone teams benefit from working with a real client partner to apply their theoretical knowledge in practice.
Concrete End Result
The community/industry partners benefit from having their technological ideas turning into real and usable software products.
Brain Retain
Muncie has a chance to keep its bright talents to itself as a part of Brain Retain program we are starting.
Fast Hiring
The students have a chance to be hired immediately or given preference by their client partners.
How does Capstone Connector work?
Community partners propose a project to the center.
Director of Capstone Connector analyzes the project. He can request more information if needed. He can accept the projects as is, with small modifications, or after separating into a few projects. See Project Requirements below.
Capstone Connector assigns a student development team to the community partner.
Community partner and student development teams work together by meeting at least once a month. At every meeting, student teams are responsible for creating and demonstrating a running software to their community partners.
Clients
Projects
Years
Students
When should a community partner give its project to Capstone Connector?
As a community partner, you should think of proposing a project to Capstone Connector instead of hiring a software development company if one or more of the following is true:
You don't have enough budget to hire professional software developers.
You don't want to deal with professional software developers.
You want to do something good for the local community through supporting the education of our students.
You want to reduce training costs of your potential future employees.
You have a side-project which you don't want to assign a budget.
You want to prototype a new feature of your already existing software.
You have an idea and want to see how its implementation will look.
Timeline of Capstone Connector projects
Project/partner solicitation
First meeting to collect project requirements
Prototype/Design/Architecture Meeting
First iteration
Second iteration
Third iteration
Fourth iteration
Fifth iteration
Acceptance testing and preparation for transfer
Sign off
Propose a Project Today
Propose a project today and we will get in touch with you for further actions.
Project Requirements
Capstone Connector doesn't have strict requirements for the proposed projects. The only thing you need to be aware of is that we don't build business card-like static web pages. There are hundreds of online services that do this for no or low cost.
We are developing custom software for your custom needs. It might be a full-stack application, a library, a mobile application, a web application, or any other software development. The community partner is free to select its technology stack for the projects. If not, the director and the team will choose the most suitable stack for the partner.
Cost of Projects
The accepted projects do not have any development cost billed to the partner. However, the partners are asked to donate some amount to the center for the expenses of the student teams and to reward them. These donations are used to cover the partner-student team meeting expenses (such as travelling) and any software licensing or cloud costs throughout the development. We also select the best project every month to reward these students with your donations.
Testimonials from Our Partners
Virginie McNamar
Betterflye
This is a great program and partnership! I really enjoyed working with the team of students. They did an incredible job with their assignment and gave us a good head start on our new software launch. They successfully laid out the infrastructure and basic functionality of our MVP. It's also a great way to give students a real life experience before they graduate and potentially find new talent to add to the team.
Joshua Kelly
Full Court Analytics
The Ball State Capstone Connector is an absolutely incredible program for both the students and businesses. From day one, the students assigned to my business showed exceptional professionalism, work ethic, and production. The students were more than willing to to meet every week to ensure that everything that was being created the way we needed. The finished product that the students produced blew away every expectation that I had. I could not recommend the Capstone Connector more to other business, as well as any prospective students. This is a truly special program.
Kyle Armstrong
Working with Dr. Ergin and his students was a phenomenal experience! The students were incredibly talented and creative. We started out with a vision of what we would like to accomplish, then the students came up with ideas to enhance it exponentially. The best part, they delivered running software that brought those visions to life!
A Ball State Faculty
Students in Dr. Ergin's capstone course have a wealth of expertise and their ability to write custom software helps a small business receive consulting and products that we could not otherwise have afforded.
A Local Partner
The students were great to work with and the project delivered value to our company.
Contact Capstone Connector Team
Capstone Connector provides a solution for keeping the projects running after the student development team graduates. Capstone Connector also respects your intellectual property. Just contact any of the key people below to discuss what are the options we provide for your specific situation or to propose a project.
Huseyin Ergin, PhD
Director of Capstone Connector
Ted Baker
Executive Director of Innovation Connector