Academics

Jan Plan 2025 courses in collaboration with the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship:

AI197  Precision Information Retrieval: AI Tools and Ethics for Document Exploration, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Jonathan Godbout

An accessible course designed for individuals with no prior coding or AI knowledge. This comprehensive program focuses on leveraging AI-powered tools to extract valuable information from documents, including text, images, tables, and even audio summaries of documents. Participants will learn to use user-friendly AI applications for analyzing documents, gaining insights into how these tools work without needing to write code. The course covers a range of techniques for document analysis, summarization, and knowledge extraction, all presented in a non-technical manner. Students will explore the differences between closed and open source models, understanding their respective strengths and applications in information retrieval. Throughout the program, students will also explore the ethical considerations of using AI for information retrieval, ensuring they can apply these powerful tools responsibly in various professional contexts.

Course highlights for 2025:

This course examined how AI tools are transforming information retrieval and learning, designed specifically for students with no prior coding experience. Through hands-on experimentation with no-code AI applications, students learned to leverage these powerful tools while developing a critical understanding of their capabilities and limitations. Students also explored the ethical considerations of using AI for information retrieval, ensuring they can apply these powerful tools responsibly in various professional contexts.

PS235 Psychology of Creativity and Innovation, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Luke Brooks-Shesler

Based on Industrial and Organizational Psychology, this course explores creativity and innovation in the workplace. Students will learn about theories, predictors, consequences, measurement and critiques of creativity and innovation at work. We will also explore potential innovations in currency, organizational design, and social media. As part of an applied project, students will work individually or in pairs on an innovative business idea, which they will pitch to the class at the end of the semester. In this seminar-style course, class meetings will include lectures, activities and discussions.

Course highlights for 2025:

• Students participated in an in-class activity in which they came up with an innovative product. Students rated the creativity and innovativeness of one another’s products. Then we tested the product to see if the products actually worked – and whether our creativity and innovativeness ratings predicted success.
• Students completed various assessments of creativity and innovation, including an innovative creative personality assessment.
• Students watched Shark Tank pitches from a few years ago and rated their creativity and innovativeness. Then we looked at how accurately our creativity and innovativeness ratings predicted the venture’s success or failure.
• On the last day of class, which Jeremy Barron attended, students pitched their new business ideas, which included a dorm room cleaning service, an AI assistant for emergency medical technicians, bread made from edible bioplastics and preservatives, an online platform for gamifying healthy habits, a pickle ball app, and a fitness app.
• Students rated the creativity and innovativeness of one another’s pitches, and provided qualitative feedback in case students would like to pursue their ideas further.

JP119 History of Digital Culture, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Mark Johnson 

Digital culture moves extremely fast, causing exponential growth, massive breakthroughs, and ever-present interconnectedness. On the other hand, it leaves many of our historic societal norms fragile and makes us question if we can handle such a rapid pace of change. This course will examine key episodes of the history of digital culture, studying the trends, people, patterns, and companies that have defined digital culture. We will unpack historic digital achievements, look for patterns, and become practitioners of our rapidly changing world, gaining a greater understanding of what technological innovation might unlock next for our society. Previously offered as JP197 for Jan Plan 2024.

JP197A Healthcare Entrepreneurship: Starting and Leading a Successful Venture, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Ken El-Sherif 

Explore the principles and practices of entrepreneurship within the booming world of healthcare. Whether it is killer apps, revolutionary medical devices, or doctors offices delivering concierge medicine, you will learn how to identify healthcare opportunities and create solutions that make a real difference. Students will learn the hottest trends influencing healthcare innovation and venture creation and practice the key fundamentals of business entrepreneurship. Get ready to launch your healthcare empire, from crafting a business plan to pitching for investment funding. Students will be able to: assess the opportunities & challenges; formulate a business idea; construct a business plan, including Business Strategy, Leadership, Financial Management, Marketing, & Business Operations; recognize ethical considerations & regulatory frameworks; communicate business concepts. Nongraded.

JP197C, Sections A & B, Business and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Mike McQuillan

Students will learn the fundamental principles of business and entrepreneurship, explore potential career pathways, and develop lifelong skills that are useful in any career. This course is designed for anyone who is “business-curious” or has thought about starting a business someday — no prior business experience required! Students will build and pitch a real startup with a team, participate in fun, active learning activities that get them on their feet, and learn “Business Basics” through a wide range of sessions covering Sales, Marketing, Product, Finance, Business Strategy, Soft Skills, and more. Enrollment will be capped at 20 students to ensure a dynamic and intimate learning environment.

Course highlights for 2025:

JP217 Regenerative Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Bob Martin

Solve real business cases to learn to think like CEOs, understand finance, market strategies, and tools for creating regenerative cultures. Course includes a lab to create ventures designed to regenerate our planet and civilization by addressing a global issue to be presented to a panel of investors and experts. Develop confidence as a leader to identify cultural, social, and technological innovations and transformations that will bring human activity and the planet’s life support systems into a mutually supportive regenerative relationship rather than an erosive and destructive one. Guests include CEOs of regenerative companies. 

Course highlights for 2025:

The central question we explored is how can we create social, cultural, and technological innovations that will help bring human activity and the planet’s life support system into a mutually supporting regenerative relationship rather than an erosive and destructive one? How should we design the businesses of tomorrow? If we are so dependent upon innovation, how do we innovate responsibly for improved global impact? Do we need a new framework for measuring business success?

We took a deep look at the practice of ideation—formulating ideas to address global issues through the lens of the regenerative business model. Students were required to develop 50 ideas over the course and winnow those down to one solid concept. We learned how to use the Systemic Design Framework and its core component, the Double Diamond Design Model, to engage in different ways of thinking. Students analyzed case studies of General Mills, Theranos, Meta, Facebook, VW, Beyond Meat, and B Lab to study choices made by leaders in advancing their business models while learning case analysis techniques and a quick primer on financial statements to help understand the theory of change. Becky McKinnell, CEO of Ibec Creative shared her company’s journey through the B Corp certification process and her reasons for doing it. The course started with viewing Beyond Zero, the story of Interface Carpet’s journey to reduce their carbon footprint.

A highlight of the course was a day spent in the Colby Museum of Art under the guidance of Christian Adamé, Mirken Director of Learning and Engagement, who challenged us to look at art more deeply and provided insights into how we generate ideas. Did you know the average length of time a person spends on looking at a piece of art in a museum is eight seconds? What happens when you spend three or four minutes? This visit was couple with learning how to conduct an “awe walk,” an easy-paced walk where the focus is on what is around you as a way to stimulate thinking and engagement with nature.

The final day was spent with students presenting their one idea to a panel that included Deb Shufrin, Colby’s Chief Investment Officer, Dean Albritton, Director, Center for the Arts & Humanities, and Richard Gorvett, Founder and Director of Deep Wave Leadership and an international expert on regenerative culture and business. Ken Chen and Myles Oo presented a genetically-modified tree to increase carbon capture; Stanford Boateng and Baker Celis developed an AI-augmented solar array to help generate electricity in northern Ghana; Joon Baik created a beverage made from wild blueberries to improve health; and Brady Blackburn suggested a building block made from plastic waste to provide homes in the Philippines to solve a housing crisis.

Fall 2024 Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship Course:

HL201  NextCapitalism: Applying an Ethics of NextCapitalism to Business, Three credit hours. Instructor: Thom Kennon

This is a project-based course designed to guide undergraduate students through the process of developing a new (public benefits corp) business, organization, product or service design framed as an ethics of nextcapitalism. The framework of nextcapitalism inspires a material response to Frederic Jameson’s infamous provocation – “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. Our core text guiding student’s experiments in a more ethical value-making informing their B-Corp business design is the professor’s book, The Bigger Leap – An Ethics of NextCapitalism. The professor will serve as start-up mentor, guiding and inspiring the student project teams in their application of the text’s cases, concepts and insights to inform their self-directed research.

Jan Plan 2024 courses in collaboration with the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship:

297Fj  Regenerative Entrepreneur: Transformative Innovation for Survival, Three credit hours. Instructor: Robert Martin

Solve real business cases to learn to think like CEOs, understand finance, market strategies, and tools for creating regenerative cultures. Course includes a lab to create ventures designed to regenerate our planet and civilization by addressing a global issue to be presented to a panel of investors and experts. Develop confidence as a leader to identify cultural, social, and technological innovations and transformations that will bring human activity and the planet’s life support systems into a mutually supportive regenerative relationship rather than an erosive and destructive one. Guests include CEOs of regenerative companies.

Course highlights for 2024:

• Students examined case studies focused on the Spanish vintner Familia Torres grappling with the impact of climate change on their centuries-old vineyards; General Mills’ strategy to place one million acres of farmland under regenerative agricultural practices; B Lab’s efforts to craft a new kind of corporate governance through B Corps certification; the impact of Unilever’s acquisition of Vermont-based Seventh Generation; the disconnect between the stated values of Google and fractures in its corporate culture; and, ways spent nuclear fuel rods could be utilized in generating electricity through new technologies.
• Neil Kiely, CEO of Androscoggin Bank in Lewiston, joined the class discussion on the B Lab case to talk about his bank’s process to become certified as a B-Corp and how that change impacted the bank and deepened its relationship in the community. Chris Lyon, Senior VP and Director of Corporate Impact for Androscoggin Bank, came to share his experience at Seventh Generation during Unilever’s acquisition process.
• Chris Lyon, Fred Lipp, attorney at BernsteinShur, and Jeremy Barron provided feedback on the last day of class when students presented their projects. Ideas included Sunbox, a window solar collector; Flow, an AI-powered counseling service; FarmStainable, a consulting practice for regenerative agriculture; Kennebec Farms, a vertical farming operation adapted for abandoned mills in Maine’s food deserts; Silk Heart, a tee shirt design business with a nonprofit devoted to supporting victims of DUI accidents; and a nonprofit distributing Maine-made window box gardens for urban dwellers. 
• Guest judges selected Flow as the Most Innovative venture; Silk Heart as the venture Most Likely to Succeed; and, SunBox as the best example of using regenerative principles.

148j From Idea to IPO: Business Strategy Basics for Next Gen Titans, Three credit hours. Instructor: Graham Powis

This course poses a key question: why do some organizations succeed and others fail? Through the lens of recent and historic initial public offerings (IPOs) including Airbnb, Allbirds, Lyft, NetFlix, PayPal, Rivian Automotive, Robinhood, Snap, Uber and others, students will focus on the concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Beginning with the basics of strategy, students will assess how entrepreneurs take an organization from an idea to an IPO. The class will ponder the decisions made along the way and ask why some firms choose to complete an IPO, while others remain private. Through the use of case studies, students will work in teams and will analyze companies that have succeeded and failed in complex and dynamic environments. The course will conclude with student-led mock board presentations.

Course highlights for 2024:

• Read “Hangry: A Startup Journey” by Mike Evans, detailing the foundation, growth, and IPO of GrubHub.
• Studied “Problem Hunting: The Tech Startup Textbook” by Brian Long.
• Analyzed a Stanford Graduate School of Business case study on Netflix’s IPO.
• Reviewed a Harvard Business School case study on Gracious Eloise focusing on its early funding stages.
• Listened to a “How I Built This” podcast episodes on S’well and ClassPass
• Engaged with Harvard Business School materials on SWOT analyses and Porter’s five forces.
• Explored IPO-related blogs on GrubHub and Redfin.
• Discussed a variety of companies, including Amazon, Amer, Birkenstock, Buffalo Wild Wings, Cava, Chewy, Chipotle, Stanley, Tesla, Uber, Whoop, Zappos, and more over four weeks.
• While in New York, saw the musical “Hamilton” and reflected on the themes of entrepreneurship, impact, disruption, and finance in the 1700s.
• Students wrote two papers and made two team presentations. One 30-minute presentation related to an analysis of a completed IPO and one 40-minute presentation focused on providing advice to a company that hasn’t yet completed an IPO.
• Students updated their classmates each day on the latest goings-on in the business world and applied various concepts covered during our course (e.g., SWOT analyses, Porter’s five forces, value chain analyses, resources-based analyses and Porter’s generic strategies)

     Guest Speakers:

• Jeremy Barron ’00, Director of the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship, Colby College (In Person)
• Glenn Rieger ’80, General Partner, NewSpring Capital (In Person)
• Bobby Donohue ’17, Vice President, Brookline Capital Markets (In Person)
• Hayden Edwards ’22, Analyst, Brookline Capital Markets (In Person)
• Jay Winthrop, Managing Member, Principal, Douglass Winthrop Advisors (In Person)
• Andrew Weinberg P’26, Chief Operating Officer, Principal, Douglass Winthrop Advisors (In Person)
• Josh Huffard, Principal, Douglass Winthrop Advisors (In Person)
• Tim Geisenheimer ’06, EIR, Lunar (In Person)
• Jack Cohen ’15, Vice President of Content and Engagement, General Catalyst (In Person)
• Mary Biggins ’05, Co-Founder, MealPal (In Person)
• John Souter, Principal, Rail-Splitter Capital Management (In Person)
• Eric Solash P’25, Managing Director, Brookline Capital Markets (In Person)
• Eloise Bune, Co-Founder, DayNew 

197j  History of Digital Culture, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Mark Johnson

Digital culture moves extremely fast, causing exponential growth, massive breakthroughs, and ever-present interconnectedness. On the other hand, it leaves many of our historic societal norms fragile and makes us question if we can handle such a rapid pace of change. This course will examine key episodes of the history of digital culture, studying the trends, people, patterns and companies that have defined digital culture. We will unpack historic digital achievements, look for patterns, and become practitioners of our rapidly changing world, gaining a greater understanding of what technological innovation might unlock next for our society.

Course highlights for 2024:

• Studied the 4 eras of digital culture:
  • 1983 – 1993: PC Era
  • 1993 – 2003: Web 1.0 Era
  • 2003 – 2013: Social/Mobile Era
  • 2013 – 2023: AI & the Exponential Age
• Learned and applied 37 concepts of digital culture.
• Engaged with curated media from the last 40 years to understand the progression of digital culture.
• Discussed future technological innovations and their potential societal impacts, using patterns from past digital culture eras.
• Created and shared edutainment videos on digital culture concepts
• Completed a final exam that required applying digital culture concepts and submitting answers in a digital-era appropriate format and style.   

     Guest Speakers:

• Jeremy Barron ’00, Director of the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship, Colby College (In Person)
• Richard Ault, former Product Manager and Chief Compliance Officer at Napster (2000-2002)
• Igor Jablokov, Founder of Yap (acquired by Amazon and integral to Alexa’s development) & CEO of Pryon Inc., an AI startup.

297Kj  Qualitative Research Methods for Customer-Centric Design, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Karen Macke

This course is essential for entrepreneurs who want to create products and services that customers love. In todays market, customer-centricity is everything. You need to understand your customers needs, wants, and pain points in order to develop products and services that resonate with them. This course will teach you the qualitative research techniques that entrepreneurs use to design customer-centric solutions. You’ll learn how to conduct interviews, focus groups, usability testing and other methods to gather insights from customers. You’ll also learn how to analyze and interpret this data to develop user-centered products and services.

Course highlights for 2024:

• Students developed a deep understanding of qualitative research methodologies and their importance in creating customer-centric designs.
• Gained skills in choosing, applying, and adapting different qualitative research techniques such as interviews, usability tests, focus groups, and ethnography.
• Explored the practical and ethical aspects of conducting qualitative research within the context of design.
• Learned to analyze and interpret qualitative data to improve design decisions and enhance experiences for customers and stakeholders.
• Within design teams students presented workflows, showcasing stakeholder maps, personas, empathy maps, and findings from qualitative research and integrated these insights into future design iterations using the Lean Canvas method.

JP248  Better Capitalism: Startup Design in Waterville, Three credit hours.  Instructor: Thom Kennon

Since the industrial revolution, capitalism has become the dominating apparatus within which humans exist across the globe. The acceleration of neoliberalism and the global financialization of capital have combined to create a generalized condition in which critics suggest – It is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end of capitalism. Given the accelerating global climate crisis, we may not have to imagine either. This course suggests the potential for an emergent form of value creation in the world of people and businesses, one perhaps understood as better capitalism. This course asks student teams to develop an in-market experiment in imagining and building a start-up business. Previously offered as JP297 for Jan Plan 2023.