Enhancing student-client relationships in capstone projects

The promise of authentic and experiential learning in higher education aims to bridge theory and practice, enhance employability, and prepare students for complex professional environments. Yet in business and management education, this promise often rests on an unspoken assumption that merely being placed in real-world contexts will enable students to navigate professional relationships with external clients. In live capstone projects where students partner with industry clients, they are expected to deliver professional outputs, often with limited preparation for the relational labour this entails, especially when the relationship with the client does not go as expected, or communication breaks down.

Within Queen Mary University of London’s School (QMUL) of Business and Management, the Contemporary Live Project (Capstone project) and the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Live Projects were developed as alternatives to the traditional dissertation. A capstone project is a culminating integrative learning experience in which students synthesise disciplinary knowledge and apply it to complex, real-world challenges, some working collaboratively with external organisations that act as key stakeholders in the learning process (Shine, 2023; Schofield & Zhou, 2024). Over successive cohorts, the module has delivered sustained impact: In particular, three MSc Management students have secured QMUL Student Enhanced Engagement and Development (SEED) awards and received job offers from client partners. Alumni and partners consistently emphasise the transferability of skills developed through these projects, from sustainability strategy to stakeholder engagement, illustrating how capstones can embed complex competencies into employability pathways.

Despite these successes, our reflective practice identified recurring challenges that are widely recognised but rarely discussed explicitly in the pedagogic literature. These include securing and preparing suitable clients who can commit time, clarify problem scopes and engage consistently with students, supporting students’ relational learning, especially given variation in confidence, professional exposure and cultural capital among diverse cohorts, maintaining consistency across different organisational contexts, such as entrepreneurial start-ups versus structured corporate partners, which impose distinct expectations and norms. These challenges resonate with experiential learning research, showing that exposure to real-world contexts alone does not guarantee deep learning; meaningful outcomes require structured reflection, guidance and pedagogical scaffolding (Kolb & Kolb, 2005). This tension exposes a critical question for educators: how should we design and support the student-client relationships that underpin it?

Mentoring as a pedagogical intervention

To address these challenges, our mentoring framework for the MSc Management and MSc Entrepreneurship and Innovation Contemporary Live Projects at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Business and Management was developed to support students in navigating the relational demands of working with diverse external partners. Both capstone projects involve collaboration with a range of organisations, including SMEs, corporate partners and start-ups, where relationship building is central to project success and where organisational contexts may evolve. Recognising that students enter these environments with uneven levels of professional experience, the framework embeds distinct but complementary mentoring roles as a pedagogical scaffold. Module organisers provide academic and advisory support, guiding project scoping, ensuring alignment with learning outcomes, and supporting students in translating practice into assessed work. Industry mentors (MSc Management) deliver up to two structured 45-minute sessions per group, focusing on professional practice, including team dynamics, roles and accountability, progress management, and client alignment. In the MSc Entrepreneurship and Innovation programme, mentoring is further supported by the SBM Entrepreneurship Hub (including Programme Directors /Professional Services), which provides ongoing, practice-based guidance tailored to start-up contexts, helping students navigate uncertainty and evolving project demands.

Impact and institutional value

Within this framework, mentoring makes the relational and professional dimensions of project work explicit rather than leaving them to emerge informally through client interaction alone. Instead of assuming that students will naturally develop the ability to manage external partnerships, the mentoring sessions foreground how students collaborate, organise their work and respond to evolving project demands. Questions of team coordination, shared responsibility, and accountability become part of the learning process rather than issues addressed only when difficulties arise. Mentoring also encourages students to critically reflect on how their progress aligns with the original project plan and how emerging challenges, whether within the team or in the client relationship, require adaptation. In doing so, students learn to interpret client feedback, negotiate expectations and maintain the quality and relevance of their outputs. Although the mentoring intervention is recent, formative evaluation through reflective practice with staff, students, clients and mentors suggests positive effects on relational competence and project quality, particularly, the enhanced professional quality of student outputs has positioned the capstone as a direct talent pipeline, with several students recruited by client organisations upon project completion.

Conclusions: Towards intentional relational design of mentoring support

Capstones offer powerful opportunities for authentic, integrative learning. However, realising that potential requires attention to the relational infrastructure that underpins them. Mentoring, conceptualised as an intentional pedagogical intervention, provides a practical framework for supporting students’ development in complex professional landscapes.

References

• Kolb, A. Y., & Kolb, D. A. (2005). Learning styles and learning spaces: Enhancing experiential learning in higher education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(2), 193–212.
  https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2005.17268566

• Shine, K. (2023). Benefits of the project model capstone: Key experience themes for journalism students. Pacific Journalism Review, 29(1/2), 167-180.  

• Schofield, L. & Zhou, X. (2024). Practical examples of integrating generative AI into the learning activities of the capstone project module. https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/practical-examples-of-integrating-generative-ai-into-the-learning-activities-of-the-capstone-project-module. Accessed on 12/03/2026