Impact 2023

A Message From Our Director

Blue Devils are among the best and brightest thinkers and doers in the world—they will lead the charge in solving some of the most complex environmental, health, and social challenges facing the world. To do this, they will need to be creative, disciplined, resourceful, critical-minded, and courageous. They will need to innovate. 

For more than a decade, Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship (Duke I&E) has inspired and empowered the Duke community to act entrepreneurially and create impact in their endeavors. We believe that an entrepreneurial mindset and skills enable our community to realize their impact by knowing how to bring an idea to life and having the courage to move from idea to action.  

Whether students want to start a company, innovate inside a large firm, commercialize their research, change the world with a social innovation, initiate public sector transformation, or pursue any number of other paths, we see what a difference it makes for them to be empowered with creativity, curiosity, a bias for action, empathy, resilience, and the tools to bring ideas to life.  

The 2023 fiscal year has been a momentous one for Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship. We officially became a partnership between Duke Interdisciplinary Studies and The Fuqua School of Business, physically moving our team to Fuqua from our previous downtown space. The benefits of being housed at Fuqua are far-reaching, including: more strongly weaving Duke I&E into the academic fabric of the institution, creating points of access for the entire campus to some of the resources and faculty expertise of a top-tier business school, and creating opportunities for Fuqua students to connect with the broader Duke community. 

The Duke I&E team continues to grow and evolve following these organizational changes. To meet increased demand for our programs, we have focused efforts on scaling those programs in a way that ensures they retain our foundational interdisciplinary approach to entrepreneurship education. Through proactive partnerships, we work to bring together the expertise within Trinity, Pratt, Fuqua, Nicholas, Sanford, Law, the Medical School, and other schools and units. In this way, we enable students to leverage their strengths and learn from diverse teams, achieving more comprehensive learning and more transformative outcomes. The Duke I&E team has also improved our data infrastructure, allowing us to better track our impact and be more agile in reaching and supporting our community. 

As we look back on a year of exciting growth for our programs, we also set ambitious goals for ourselves and look forward to experimenting with new ways of serving the Duke community. In the coming year, we will be offering Duke I&E Pop-ups—skill-building workshops designed to build community across Duke—expanding our Creator Lab, which equips faculty and students with knowledge and strategies to effectively utilize modern digital tools to share their work with wide-ranging public audiences on social media platforms, and launching a Technology Commercialization Bootcamp in collaboration with the Office of Translation & Commercialization. 

So much of innovation and entrepreneurship is about the sparks that fly when people talk to each other and generate new ideas—particularly when those from diverse backgrounds and disciplines collaborate and share their unique perspectives. To that end, we are thrilled to be moving into our new permanent home at Fuqua, The Luby Family Bullpen, made possible by a generous donation from William K. Luby MBA ’85 and Eileen O. Luby. Duke I&E’s new home is not only beautiful, but also functional, an energizing hub for innovators and entrepreneurs from across Duke. We’re excited to welcome students, alumni, faculty, staff, and visitors to the space to learn, connect, work, and spark new ideas together. 

I invite you to explore our impact, over the past year, in the areas of our curricular offerings, experiential co-curricular programs, the Duke I&E Network, and how we’re leveraging and spotlighting Duke faculty’s contributions to innovation and entrepreneurship. 

Thank you for your partnership in creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem that both inspires and empowers our community to change the world. 

To Impact, 

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