Suggested Structure of the Final Report
Evidence is key. Documenting assumptions is critical. The best audience to keep in mind is always “future you.”
Tips:
- Capture facts, hypotheses, assumptions, data, and the way in which you built conclusions out of them.
- “Future you” will appreciate the use of full sentences over lone keywords or unqualified lists.
- There are some things “future you” will not find useful: how hard you worked or the chronology of that work.
General Considerations
The report must contain the information outlined and be easy and enjoyable to read. Specifically, it must live up to professional standards, be written in good prose, and include visuals and tables as needed to support explanation. The body of the report cannot exceed 10 pages, but you are allowed to (and encouraged) to include appendices—You should include in them any other detailed/structured information you believe “future you” would wish you had.
The report must be supported by evidence and document your current beliefs about how the technology will evolve, how to navigate through community adjacencies, and ultimately, how to solve a problem sustainably.
- Written portion (10 pages maximum): The final report should motivate the opportunity space without going into excessive detail as to the processes that led you there; you may leave that for the appendices.
- Evidence: You need to back up findings with evidence gathered throughout the semester. Interviews, quotes, and “legwork” evidence are infinitely more compelling than displays of Google prowess.
- Reasoning: You are developing your reasoning for an organization (established or new) to devote significant resources to scale up a technology to solve a problem or to not do that at all.
- Make sure you believe what you say.
- Identify the nature of the organization you deem best suited to carry out that scale-up.
- Timeline: Technologies eventually leave MIT; do not forget to identify when that will happen, given your proposed timeline.
- Table(s): The report must contain at least one table that relates all the domains of application you explored to one another and to key attributes/functionality of the technologies you explored. It is OK to do multiple tables.
- Appendices: Append to the document all your logs and lists. The required table can be in the appendices.
