At the Academy, students and faculty work together to learn how to spot challenges and generate creative responses in complex and often under-explored territories.

Challenge-Based Reflective Learning (CBRL) is a foundational component of the Academy learning framework. Using a unique blend of society and industry-driven challenge prompts, Academy students learn to develop projects in response to complex problems facing individuals, communities, organizations, and society at large. 

To accomplish this, students work in and out, back and forth, and through a series of stages for innovation:

Discern: collaborate with diverse stakeholders to understand the problem spaces you are working within .

Prompt: write a challenge prompt; an ambitious and open-ended question that serves as the project’s North Star.

Prototype: learn and explore the challenge through active making.

Feedback: access insights from a diverse network of stakeholders; plan to improve/next steps.

With the Academy’s model of CBRL, students develop skills and knowledge in and between design, technology, business, and communication, to bring an idea to life and build tangible prototypes. Through experimentation, iteration, collaboration, and reflection, students develop a powerful mental framework to analyze challenges and synthesize information to advance human-centric solutions towards a sustainable and equitable future.

Google: What does the future of the Internet look like? How might we “search,” navigate, and organize information in the future? 

EY: What are the key signals of change to invest in, in healthcare, energy, and food, that have the most potential for growth and positive impact in our daily lives?

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles: How might we leverage virtual healthcare technologies to improve the healthcare experience for pediatric patients managing diabetes and obesity?

The Mayor’s Office, City of Los Angeles: In what ways can the City of Los Angeles best support small businesses who have been impacted by the COVID-era, or best prepare businesses for future challenges?

The Academy’s CBRL model provides a powerful professional experience for students, while advancing the skills they need to succeed, wherever they choose to go:

Critical Thinking: Students conduct rigorous research to identify and validate problems worth solving.

Collaboration: Realizing the full complexity and dimensionality of a problem reinforces the need to work with a diverse team and learn to understand different processes and perspectives.

Creative Problem Solving: Students leverage competencies in design, business, technology, and communication developed through the Academy’s signature curriculum and focused ‘toolkits’ to explore how domain intersections and combinations generate new insights and solutions.

Knowledge Transfer: Experiences with a diverse set of sociotechnical challenges allows students to develop generalizable techniques that can be transferred across challenges and contexts

Communication: Students develop the ability to bring clarity to a problem and inspire an audience with a solution.

Iteration and Agility: Students engage in continuous reflection, experimentation, iteration, and learning.

Creative Facilitation and Systems Thinking: Students learn to coordinate and manage complex projects, systems, and teams.

Design Strategy: Design-driven innovation that balances the needs of business with the needs of people.

Challenge-Based Reflective Learning is interwoven throughout the academic experience and made available to students across our undergraduate and graduate programs.

Introductory courses, such as Innovators Forum, provide students with the tools they need to confront challenges; a safe space to tackle problems with faculty and industry guests.

The Integrated Core courses, such as Disruptive Innovation, Interactive Data Structures, and Practice of Design connect core competencies in business, technology and design to complex sociotechnical challenges.

The Academy’s diverse range of intersectional areas represent the unique expertise of the school and its faculty.

Faculty work with students to launch projects in response to societal challenges, such as social justice, health innovation, climate change, inclusive learning and more.

Industry and society-driven challenges advance students into a situation in which they need to work collaboratively to address a real-world problem space.

Students engage in semester-long courses as well as pop-up hackathons and “labs” that challenge them to address urgent problems, with real stakes.

Challenges are aligned with industry needs; student and faculty interests and expertise.

Private sector partnerships include Mattel, adidas, EY; public and social sector industry partnerships include the American Heart Association, LAX, and the City of Los Angeles.

Student-Driven Ventures are mentored by faculty and industry guests, and include undergraduate and graduate capstone courses and an annual Venture Showcase as part of the Academy’s Innovation Quest experience, which work together to empower student founders, foster innovation, and create a lasting impact within the Academy community and beyond.

Students themselves identify challenges through a process of iterative discernment, prompting, prototyping, and feedback.

Students launch ventures, products, services, campaigns, organizations, and careers that tackle the challenges they most care about.

Along the journey, students meet with industry leaders, investors, and other partners on and off the USC campus (i.e. AMI, EY, Techstars) to receive direct feedback on their work, test their strategy on professional experts, and more.

The Academy’s collaborative learning environment is enriched by its diversity of culture, background, experience, thought and purpose. In selecting students for each cohort, Academy faculty and administration seek a deliberate range of disciplinary strengths as well as perspectives, viewpoints, and life experiences.  The Academy believes firmly in inclusion as it applies to every aspect of a human being, and as defined broadly, and have found that both the synergies and the initial tensions that this creates make for an incredibly vibrant, and challenging collaborative creative environment. 

Branding video by IYA freshman, Ryan Curcio

IYA Student Video

The world-unique Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees build on the Academy’s signature integrated learning framework that is focused on the intersection of human-centered design, technology, entrepreneurship, and communication.