Interactive Media Business (Minor)
Program Description
The Interactive Media + Business (IMB) major is where innovation + business meet through emerging media technology. It teaches how innovative ideas combine with technology, creativity and business principles to yield viable products, services and experiences. Students of Interactive Media + Business (IMB), will be challenged to imagine and implement interactive products and services that fearlessly investigate the recently possible in media, technology, and communication. IMB majors are also expected to think holistically about the impact of their work in society as well as the business value, whether it involves software or hardware, virtual or physical, product or experiment. The IMB major welcomes interest in entrepreneurship in all forms — large organizations or startups, for-profit or not-for-profit — that bring about disruptive changes and create positive social impact. Students of IMB will acquire a design-and-build mindset and gain experience by implementing creative solutions to real business problems in order to graduate well prepared for stimulating careers or future learning journeys in diverse organizations across the globe.
IMB majors and minors will take a unique blend of interactive media and business foundation courses, including Innovation Lab, which introduces modern rapid software prototyping, theories of innovation, early-stage business concepts, creative coding and user experience design. For their second emerging media foundation, IMB students will choose between one of 5 courses: Interaction Lab, which covers interaction design, electronics, computation, and digital fabrication, Communications Lab, which covers digital media production methods, including imaging, audio, video, and Web development, or What is New Media? A course designed to give students a strong theoretical and historical background in new media arts, Creative Coding Lab, which introduces students to the fundamentals of computation, software design, and web technologies and Introduction to Media Industries and Institutions. Business foundations include Economics of Global Business and Principles of Financial Accounting.
Students also choose from a range of flexible core and elective categories across the disciplines of business, emerging media, art and design, the humanities, social and physical sciences, as well as computation and data. Majors finish with a year-long Capstone course by synthesizing their learning to date and applying their learning to prototype an artifact (an idea, product, or service) that creates value in the real world.