Ke Hu

The main question this project asks is how accelerators, “schools of startup entrepreneurship," are changing our imagination about the future of food through incubating emerging food technologies that flow between the US and China. Extremely important for contemporary innovation culture, accelerators' practices, cultures and social significance have not garnered enough scholarly attention. This project, based on participant observations over the course of a year, will record these institutions’ daily practices, and examine how those practices, together with their investors’ and employees’ beliefs, produce its tech and business culture. Then it investigates their broader social impacts and society's response to their emergence. It ultimately asks: "what is an accelerator?"