Overview:
Through the Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certificate Program, I focused on developing the skills needed to launch commercially-orientated startups and social entrepreneurship ventures.
My coursework included both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Some courses involved covering cases from the Harvard Business School while other parts of the program were project-based, aimed at getting hands-on experience starting ventures of my own. The I&E Certificate Program helped me gain the experience to tackle entrepreneurial challenges including lean methodology, growth strategy, creating financing and resource structures, and effective marketing/communication strategies. The Program also provided an opportunity for me to develop relevant skills for leading, managing, and working effectively within teams, creating a positive and ethical work culture, and evaluating venture success.
The Duke I&E Program served as sort of an entrepreneurial “bootcamp” for me. It laid a strong foundation of the skills, experience, and resources necessary to jumpstart my own entrepreneurial ventures or support others in their ventures.
I&E Capstone Project:
One of the most exciting opportunities offered to me through the I&E Program was the chance to directly apply what I have learned to develop a venture idea of my own. Throughout the semester, I, along with two other students, developed “Crowdfinder”, a solution to the lost and found system on college and professional campuses/facilities. My group members and I all had different academic backgrounds ranging from tech/computer science, economics/business, and branding/media and advertising. Together, we spent a semester testing the viability and scalability of our idea through testing customer demand on Duke’s campus, developing and executing successful customer acquisition strategies on campus, and developing a business model. Through our efforts to deliver a valuable service, we managed to aggregate a community of individuals/potential user-base of over 500 Duke students on our brand’s Instagram account.
Click HERE to see some of the survey reports my group generated while testing customer demand on Duke’s campus.
Below you can find a video describing a Scalable Acquisition Test my group conducted:
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Art & Markets:
Analyzing the Correlation between Artists’ Instagram Presence and Success at Auction
As a fulfillment for one of the I&E program requirements, I took a research-based course on the Art Market. The study linked above explores the relationship between levels of user engagement and overall Instagram presence for artists’ Instagram accounts and artists’ sales performance at auction. This relationship is assessed through comparing total number of Instagram posts, total number of followers, total number of likes, total number of comments, and total number of #hashtags containing or associated with artists’ names, in years after their emergence on Instagram with the sales price of works (USD) and the number of sales at auction. All Instagram data was scraped programmatically from Websta.com and all sales data on artist’s work included in the study was scraped from ArtNet. This study investigates the degree to which the aforementioned factors related to Instagram presence and engagement can be and are currently being used as a tool to promote and drive sales of art works. Through this analysis, we aim to provide key insights into how the relationship between artists and buyers is transforming with technological advances and the degree to which new platforms on the web such as Instagram are being successfully leveraged by artists and potentially coming to shape the future of the art market by shifting the channels by which art is sold.
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Harvard Business School Sample Case-Study:
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Summary:
I learned through my experiences in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Capstone project that launching a successful venture requires working and communicating effectively in a team, establishing a network of insightful mentors and knowledgeable advisors, and pivoting and iterating to identify and meet market demands.
