Teaching Case: The Initial Coin Offering Marketplace--A Data Analytic

This case uses data analytic techniques to expose students to the context of the initial coin offering marketplace. The exercise is well-suited as a group activity in an undergraduate or graduate business analytics course in which students have been taught analytic techniques such as word cloud, descriptive statistics, basic visualizations, and decision tree analysis. The data comes from the real-world initial coin offering market, so students learn about the business aspects of the initial coin offering market and the underlying technology of blockchain. As a result, the students gain a chance to practice basic analytic techniques and leverage those techniques to learn more about the business context. This project-based case provides scripts for instructors using the free, open-source software R; however, an instructor may choose alternative analytic platforms to implement the analysis. The activity may also be made accessible for novice analytics students as a first experience in R by providing the accompanying solution scripts to the students.