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In this paper, our Founders Lab team members — Jacob Benevento, Sydney Evans, and Alec Whiteley — recount the year-long entrepreneurial journey that led to the creation and launch of our venture, Certified Circular. Certified Circular is a program that certifies on-campus events for implementing circular practices into their activities as well as off-campus businesses. The venture was formed in response to our group’s propelling question and industry selection, which called on us to create and market a venture within the ethical circular economy.
The market for searching for food online is exploding. According to one expert at Google, “there are over 1 billion restaurant searches on Google every month” (Kelso, 2020). To capture this market and ride the general digital trend of internet personalization (as evidenced by Google search results, ads, YouTube and social media algorithms, etc), we created Munch to be an algorithm meant to help people find food they’ll love. <br/>Munch offers the ability to search for food by the restaurant or even as specific as a menu item (ex: search for the best Pad Thai). The best part? It is customized to your preferences based on a quiz you take when you open the app and from that point continuously learns from your behavior. This thesis documents the journey of the team who founded Munch, what progress we made and the reasoning behind our decisions, where this idea fits in a competitive marketplace, how much it could be worth, branding, and our recommendations for a successful app in the future.
This research covers the landscape of influencer marketing and combines it with the knowledge of 11 content creators and one social media specialist, ultimately producing an actionable handbook. Participants were asked questions that were intended to discover key strategies, level of difficulty, and overall insight into the content creator world. Best practices and key findings are identified in the research paper, and outlined into four parts in the handbook. The handbook serves as a compilation framework derived from my primary and secondary sources designed to provide anyone interested in becoming a content creator or social media influencer on steps they may take given what their predecessors have done to successfully launch their careers in the space.
A guide to implementing empathy in crisis communications
This thesis will bring together students to engage in entrepreneurship by finding, measuring and sharing strategic market opportunities. From a student’s perspective, it will take a deep dive into the world of startup ecosystems, markets and trends utilizing both qualitative and quantitative market research techniques. The information gathered has been curated into a productive, meaningful manner, through a report titled “The State of Startups: A Student Perspective.” <br/>The first key theme of this thesis is that market intelligence can be a powerful tool. The second key theme is the power of knowledge implementation towards competitive strategies. The first section of the thesis will focus on identifying and understanding the current “startup” landscape as a basis on which to build strategic and impactful business decisions. This will be accomplished as the team conducts a landscape analysis focused on the student perspective of the student-based North American “entrepreneurial” ecosystem. The second section of the thesis will focus specifically on the personal experiences of student startup founders. This will be accomplished through the analysis of interviews with founders of the startups researched from the first section of the thesis. This will provide us with a direct insight into the student perspective of the student-based North American “entrepreneurial” ecosystem.
As social media and technology continue to impact the way students communicate and receive information, it is encouraged that university student-run organizations utilize social media platforms as a tool to further the development of their organizations. Social media platforms allow student organizations to network, promote awareness of their organizations, current campus events, and provide the opportunity to develop strong associations and interactions among students. Overall, student-run organizations currently utilize a wide variety of social media; however, frequently it is used without a clear understanding of its role and best practices, which could lead to a loss of effectiveness in their communication with students. Therefore, these factors suggest the need for university student-run organizations to recognize and understand the opportunities that effective social media strategies can bring as a communication tool to enhance student engagement.
The Charlie Hebdo attacks fueled an online debate over freedom of expression and religion, whereas the purpose of social media evolved into a humanitarian one following the November 13 attacks in Paris. This research looks into the individual evolutions of the related hashtags that surfaced in 2015, including #JeSuisCharlie (and its opposites, such as #JeNeSuisPasCharlie), #DonDuSang, #PorteOuverte and #RechercheParis, among others. Another research point was with the September 11 attacks—with the 9/11 attacks against the United States, few to no channels were available for the kind of immediate discussions and support seen after the Paris attacks. After spending time in Paris during the spring 2015 semester and researching the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the history of the publication, the conclusion rests on the idea that the online discussions perpetuated by both supporters and dissenters of the magazine contribute to a more robust, open democracy supported by these social media platforms.
A portion of this thesis also delves into the parallels and differences between the American First Amendment and the French free speech laws—all of which pertain to the Charlie Hebdo content and the online responses to the 2015 Paris attacks.
The interviews conducted include a French art history professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, two creators of the “Je Suis Charlie” Facebook page, an American journalist living in Paris who covered the Charlie Hebdo attack and who was present during the November attacks, and a Muslim-American doctor in Phoenix who founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. The ideas surrounding free speech, the value of art such as that found within the pages of Charlie Hebdo, the media’s treatment of religion, traditional democratic freedoms and ties to social media revolutions are all components of this research thesis.
