CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP was a multi-disciplinary applied design course created by Altringer at SEAS and Professor Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School. The course was offered in partnership with the Harvard Innovation Lab in Winter Session in 2013 and 2014.

This project emerged from observing a persistent and superficial assumption that startups have to move to the Bay Area to become successful. A short field study yielded high-level patterns in the startup communities in the Bay Area, NYC, and Boston. In particular, New York City hosts many startups in the creative industries (new ventures in fashion, food, fine arts, performing arts, music, video entertainment, literary fiction, etc.). Further, their founders approach was less clearly about disrupting the status quo (as is a common goal for Bay Area startups) as it was about partnering with established players in new ways. Responding to this, I created this field course focused on cultural entrepreneurship in New York City with Professor Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School. We explored how new ventures in the creative arts are launched, and how proximity to NYC’s rich ecosystem of established companies, investors, and supporting organizations (e.g., universities, foundations, trade press, industry associations) influences the ventures’ evolution. The image below show many of the organizations involved.

Selection of companies we visited during the course: