ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the conversion of a traditional lecture-based business strategy course into an innovative community-based learning (CBL) course. The business strategy course is designed to be the final course that undergraduate business majors take and is considered to be a “capstone” course; a course in which students integrate the learning they have accumulated throughout their academic careers. The course, as converted into a CBL course, integrates broad general education goals and traditional business strategy content through a community-based project with explicit deliverables, based on opportunities or problems identified by community partners. Significantly, these changes allowed the business strategy course to serve as the university capstone (required of all Portland State University undergraduate students) while simultaneously improving the experience that students received in the business capstone. We provide a historical view of the conversion so that other institutions considering such a change can learn from our experience.