Harvard Announces Deans' Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge Finalists

Harvard announced the 10 team finalists for the first-ever Deans’ Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge on Monday.

Faculty and alumni judges selected the finalists from a pool of 70 applications submitted to the Challenge, one of two dean-sponsored contests hosted at the Harvard Innovation Lab this year.

The finalists will each receive $5,000, the guidance of an experienced mentor, and space in the i-lab to continue developing their projects. The winning team and as many as four runners-up will split $75,000 at the Challenge’s culmination in May.

The Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge charged student teams across the University to develop sustainable solutions for expanding the role of the arts in society.

“[Cultural entrepreneurs] try to provide the infrastructure to help support arts and artists or enable arts and artists to have a greater impact on society,” Harvard Business School professor Mukti V. Khaire said.

Paul H. Smith, a member of a team finalist, Music+1, said that the interplay between art and business is at the core of his team’s proposal.

“While [Music+1] has to be a successful business, at its heart, it has musical and cultural goals,” he said.

Music+1 is a mobile application that accompanies a musician playing concertos, sonatas, or chamber music, and adjusts the speed and volume of the accompaniment to match the soloist’s style in real-time.

Other finalist proposals include the use of 3-D printing to allow the visually impaired to “see” paintings through touch, as well as the creation of a nonprofit organization in India proposing to build partnerships between government, artists, and designers to create civic engagement in governance.

“Creative cultural entrepreneurship is something that I’ve been aspiring to for a long time,” said HBS student Emily A. Rasmussen, the team leader of Art&Venue, formerly CreativeSPACES. Art&Venue is an online platform where emerging artists can find and book venues for their work.

Khaire said that Harvard’s involvement in the challenge is important because of the University’s unique ability to “validate new ideas.”

“By putting its name behind the Challenge, Harvard stands to really emphasize to society the impact of arts and culture to our lives, to make cultural entrepreneurship a much more valid and accepted career path,” she said.

The Deans’ Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge is one of three innovation contests initiated by the University this year. The Deans’ Health and Life Science Challenge finalists will be announced this month; the President’s Challenge finalists were announced March 25.

—Staff writer Marco J. Barber Grossi can be reached at mbarbergrossi@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @marco_jbg.