The world of business is constantly evolving, as leaders face increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous challenges. The UQ MBA encourages future leaders not only to embrace ambiguity but to create value and new opportunities that have both economic and social benefits.
To achieve this goal, our students learn how to solve complex (even ‘wicked’) problems and provide meaningful solutions to the challenges our society and workplaces are facing.
This practical learning experience is unique to the UQ MBA through our suite of Impact Academy courses. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll learn in these courses and why they’re so beneficial.
What is the UQ MBA Impact Academy?
This powerful learning experience provides you the opportunity to learn transferable problem-solving skills and then apply learnings to create products, services or business ideas that unlock value for stakeholders. Complete your choice of 1, 2 or 3 sequential Impact Academy courses to build your knowledge and applied expertise.
Impact Academy 1: Discovering New Solutions for Complex Problems
During this course, you’ll gain an understanding of key innovation and entrepreneurial tools and frameworks to address complex, ‘wicked’ problems. Working in teams, you’ll learn how to interrogate and define problems and the opportunity they present by conducting interviews. Then, you’ll decide on the best strategy to use to solve the problem, unlock value or create a new opportunity. You’ll also decide whether it’s worth progressing and exploring the project further.
This course is mandatory for all UQ MBA students unless you want to pursue a research pathway. Want to see your new entrepreneurial venture or industry partner project through to fruition? You can also complete 2 additional Impact Academy courses as electives.
Impact Academy 2: Designing Solutions That Create Value
This course allows you to further pursue the project you started in Impact Academy 1 or your own idea or startup venture. Otherwise, you can work with an industry client to co-develop and co-design solutions to a problem. In this course, you’ll apply the skills you developed in Impact Academy 1 to explore questions such as:
- Is this a good idea?
- Is this a valid opportunity?
- Can I create a desirable, feasible or viable business model to execute this idea?
Impact Academy 3: Delivering and Capturing New Value
In the final course in the series, you’ll work on taking your idea to the next stage through execution. You’ll develop a plan and build a strategy with the goal of taking your idea or project to market. Depending on your project, this could involve securing funding or embedding your idea, service or product innovation into an organisation or industry.
What you’ll learn
During these immersive courses, you’ll gain practical and impactful approaches to understanding humans, solving complex problems and creating and delivering value to diverse stakeholders across businesses and sectors.
Practical skills you’ll develop
- High-level stakeholder management
- Client engagement and negotiation
- Working collaboratively with a high-performing team
- Complex business problem solving
- Lean startup and agile tools
- Research discovery
- Formulating strategic recommendations
- Innovation, ideation and creativity
- Pitching to and influencing a senior management team
Examples of previous MBA project partners
- Hatch
- Suncorp
- Anglicare
- Autism Qld
- Queensland Police
- SRO Technology
- Brisbane City Winery
- Australian Robotics
- MS Queensland
- Tritium
- MEC Mining
- Brisbane Arts Theatre
- Children’s Health Queensland
- Workcover Queensland
- Australian Superannuation Funds Association
- Magpie Goose
- Boeing Research and Technology
- Viva Energy
- Queensland AI Hub
- Unity Water
UQ MBA projects were previously called MBA capstone projects.
Our Impact Academy expert
Cameron Turner is an Entrepreneur in Residence and Industry Professor at UQ Business School. He’s also the coordinator of the UQ MBA Impact Academy. He has over 30 years of experience researching problems, developing solutions and transforming ideas into sustainable competitive advantage. He has also founded 4 startups commercialising world-first innovations.
We believe that the sort of students we get in the UQ MBA have the capacity to really have an impact on the world. The UQ MBA Impact Academy is designed to help people who aren’t interested in following business as usual and the status quo but want to do something that has meaning.
Find out more about the UQ academics you’ll learn from during the MBA.
MBA project examples
Siobhan Coster
"I really wanted to develop my entrepreneurial skills, because that’s the direction I wanted to go with my career and I had a business idea that I wanted to test. As part of the project course, you learn how to apply entrepreneurial theory to validate, build, grow and scale businesses.
"The team present you with a few different companies you’re able to work with on your project, and at the time, one of these companies was CSIRO. As a result, I put my own idea on the backburner and eagerly threw myself into exploring the opportunity CSIRO presented us with."
"During this MBA project, I worked with CSIRO and 2 other students to investigate how we could identify commercialisation opportunities for this amazing technology CSIRO have called precision fermentation. We came up with a food technology startup, which uses this technology to sustainably make crucial nutrients from yeast, starting with lactoferrin – an immunity-boosting nutrient found in breast milk."
"Since graduating, I have continued to work on the startup with CSIRO as a venture builder and am on a mission to make crucial nutrients, such as lactoferrin, more accessible."
Jan Bodnaruk
"I chose to focus on starting my own engineering company, which had been my goal from the beginning of the program.
"Over 13–14 weeks, I was able to identify what my clients wanted, what problems they wanted to solve, and how I could implement solutions to those problems. I had particularly great mentorship from the professor who was able to guide me through the whole process.
"The course was assessed based on our understanding of what we needed to do to make sure our business would be viable and successful. For the purposes of the assessment, it didn’t matter if the business would be successful in 10 years’ time; it was more about making sure we understood the process of researching whether our idea and ventures were really something the market needs and whether there were clients for it."
"I was able to use all the learnings from the MBA but particularly this MBA capstone project to start my own company, BB Civil, 2 weeks after graduating."
Excited to see where the UQ MBA Impact Academy could take you?
