In their final year at UC Santa Cruz, Evan Rantala and Julien Howard enrolled in CRWN 102: Corporate Innovation Laboratory at Crown College, looking for a class where they could work on a project that would matter beyond the quarter.
“We wanted to be in a class where we could build something,” said Howard, a computer science major graduating this spring. “A lot of our courses focus on fundamentals, which are important. But this course was about solving a problem that someone in industry cared about.”
Rantala, an applied mathematics major with a computer science minor, wanted a break from theory-heavy coursework.
“It was a chance for me to test my skills in a more industry-focused setting,” he said. “It ended up being the most unique class I’ve taken here.”
A classroom built like an innovation lab
CRWN 102 is structured less like a traditional lecture and more like a working innovation team.
Sridhar Rao, adjunct professor in entrepreneurship. Photo: Carolyn Lagattuta.
Taught by Sridhar Rao, an adjunct professor in entrepreneurship and innovation with experience in venture capital and corporate innovation at companies including Meta and Samsung, the course simulates an organization called Project TerraForma. On the first day, students don’t just join a class; they are added to the company’s organizational chart and tasked with solving real, open-ended industry challenges.
Many of those challenges come directly from industry partners. According to Rao, companies often recognize these problems as important but lack the bandwidth to prioritize them, creating space for students to test ideas and explore new approaches.
“I tell them, ‘You’ve joined an innovation organization,’” Rao said. “You’re not here to find the right answer. You’re here to explore. It’s okay if your hypothesis fails — what matters is what you learn and how you communicate it.”
Students design industry-standard Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), refine them throughout the quarter, and engage directly with engineers and leaders from partner organizations. At the end of the term, they present their work to representatives from sponsoring companies.
“In most classes, you’re working toward a correct solution,” Rantala said. “Here, we were graded on how well we met the goals we set for ourselves and how we adapted when things didn’t work. That’s much closer to how work happens in industry.”
For Rantala and Howard, the problem they chose to solve was a geospatial challenge posed through the Overture Maps Foundation, an open mapping collaboration backed by major technology companies.
Solving a problem most people don’t think about
Julien Howard (left) and Evan Rantala developed an open-source system to detect building entrances as part of CRWN 102: Corporate Innovation Laboratory at Crown College.
Most navigation apps can tell you where a building is. But they can’t reliably tell you where to enter it.
“In urban areas, you’re often routed to the wrong side of a building,” Rantala said. “Building entrances are a missing layer in map data, and satellite imagery can’t capture that.”
The project goal was to create an open-source system that could detect building entrances in street-level imagery and connect each entrance to the correct structure.
The team worked with about 750 images from Mapillary, a platform for user-submitted street-level photos, to train a YOLOv8 object detection model. They then used geometric reasoning, drawing on camera metadata and building footprints, to determine whether a door appeared in an image and which building it belonged to.
On a validation set that included Santa Cruz and Seattle, their model achieved 83.3 percent precision.
“It’s not perfect,” Rantala said. “Occlusions and image quality are still challenges, but it shows that the approach works.”
The team published their work as an open-source pipeline, and it was later highlighted through the TerraForma program of the Overture Maps Foundation, giving the students visibility within the open-source mapping community.
“It was motivating to know this wasn’t just for a grade,” Howard said. “We were building something that the open-source community and potentially major tech companies could use. Knowing our work could live beyond the classroom made me push myself harder.”
Part of a larger vision for Crown and the colleges
CRWN 102 is part of Crown’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E) Certificate, which also includes another course co-developed and taught by Rao, CRWN 152: Startup Deal Sourcing and Investing, which teaches students how to identify and pitch investment opportunities in startup companies.
“At Crown, we’re building courses that move past lectures and into hands-on work,” said Katia Obraczka, interim provost of Crown College. “Students connect with industry professionals and work on real-world problems beyond the classroom.”
The I&E Certificate, open to undergraduates in any major, blends academic coursework with hands-on experience, community collaboration, and professional networking. Students complete introductory courses, an upper-division venture-building class, a practicum working with real clients, and pitch business projects in public competitions with industry participation. More than 2,000 students have taken courses now included in the certificate, and enrollment continues to grow.
The certificate is offered in close collaboration with UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED) and other campus partners. Crown’s role within the UC Santa Cruz college system allows it to build programs outside traditional degree pathways and bring professionals from the broader community into the classroom.
“At the beginning of the quarter, students think in checklists. Over time, they start thinking in terms of measurable impact. They learn to refine assumptions and adapt. That’s what innovation really looks like.”
Sridhar Rao
“Successful entrepreneurs bring their networks into the classroom, adding tremendous value to our students’ education,” said Manel Camps, former Crown College Provost and current faculty director of CIED. “Entrepreneurship brings together leadership, collaboration, communication, and initiative. These skills complement any major.”
For students like Rantala and Howard, CRWN 102 got them thinking beyond completing assignments and reconsidering what counts as success.
For Rao, that shift in mindset is the real outcome.
“At the beginning of the quarter, students think in checklists,” he said. “Over time, they start thinking in terms of measurable impact. They learn to refine assumptions and adapt. That’s what innovation really looks like.”
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