The Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD) was a five-year accelerator program of Duke University that brought together interdisciplinary partners from Duke University to create an integrated global health social entrepreneurship hub. SEAD was funded through a $10 million contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) through the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN).
SEAD mobilized a community of practitioners, investors, policymakers, faculty, staff, and students through its core partners CASE, Innovations in Healthcare, Duke Global Health Institute, and Investors’ Circle. These collaborations sought to identify, assess, and build capacity of innovative solutions, technologies, and business models for healthcare delivery and preventive services in developing countries around the world.
SEAD Innovator Cohorts
2013 Cohort
2014 Cohort
Insights from SEAD
CASE’s work through SEAD was instrumental in providing experience and insights that shaped many of our tools and trainings, including CASE Smart Impact Capital, our online toolkit on raising impact investment capital, and Scaling Pathways, our research project on scaling social impact.
Additional knowledge products from SEAD that capture lessons learned and policy implications for entrepreneurs and the broader development community:
Highlights from the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke. At the conclusion of the five-year accelerator program, the SEAD team reflects on the program sharing key findings, reports, toolkits, and guides.
Decoding the ABCs of Effective Enterprise Acceleration: 10 Lessons from SEAD. Like learning a new language, scaling an enterprise is full of unknowns, imperfect attempts, and lessons for the future. Enterprise accelerators often serve as translators between their participants and the outside world. In doing so, accelerators must decipher between what they assume will be effective and what the enterprises they serve want and need. How can enterprise accelerators crack the code? The SEAD team shares 10 lessons for other accelerators.
Healthcare Innovation in East Africa: Navigating the Ecosystem. Healthcare innovators face many critical external and internal challenges to growth and scale within the East Africa context. This analysis reveals a number of issues, prospects and ecosystem-building partnership possibilities that can help shape the future potential of innovations to make quality healthcare more accessible and affordable.
Fundraising for Global Health Social Enterprises: Lessons from the Field. Interviews with investors and global health social enterprises provide insight into common challenges and emerging best practices for fundraising in the field of global health. Trends in the current funding landscape are also described. The authors outline three fundamental questions global health social enterprises should address as they develop fundraising strategies.
Strengthening Health Systems in Developing Countries Through Private Investment: Lessons from the Global Health Investment Landscaping Project. Authors reviewed approximately 85 organizations and interviewed approximately 30 capital providers to better understand the current landscape of global health investors in India and East Africa. To address the main challenges identified for impact investors, the authors developed a two-step framework for evaluating health sector opportunities.
Guide to Governance, Management, and Team Development: A resource for Global Health Impact Investors. Evaluating a company’s founders, management team, governance structure, and overall organizational development is one of the most important and challenging parts of the due diligence process – one that can be even more complicated when working with global health innovations in complex regulatory environments and emerging markets. This tool, developed by Investors’ Circle’s Global Health Advisory Board, helps investors understand what organizational development characteristics to look for when assessing global health investment opportunities at different stages of growth.
Shared Vision, Different Perspectives: Catalyzing Co-Investment into Early-Stage Impact Enterprises in Kenya. Based on experiences bringing impact investors to Kenya, Investors’ Circle white paper describes how investors can better fund early-stage impact enterprises in Kenya.