Some Social Entrepreneurship Grad Programs

Rolfe Larson offers a nice sampling of graduate school programs in the U.S. focused on social entrepreneurship or social innovation.

Many of these programs are tied to a business school, which can really help when you bring your great social change idea to the marketplace.  And if you’re already mid-career seeking an advanced degree in social enterprise, there are many opportunities to do that as well.

Here’s a sampling of some well-regarded programs:

Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business has an Executive Program in Social Entrepreneurship. Details at http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exed/epse/index.html

Harvard University’s MBA program has a social enterprise component and several CEU programs that specialize in social enterprise.  Details http://www.hbs.edu/socialenterprise/

Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at the Fuqua School of Business has what I consider to be the best professor in the field, Greg Dees.  Details at: http://www.caseatduke.org/

Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology (GSEP) has a Master of Arts in Social Entrepreneurship, with a mixture of classroom and online education.  Details at: http://gsep.pepperdine.edu/masters-social-entrepreneurship-and-change/

Bainbridge Graduate School specializes in online programs with short stints, with an MBA program emphasizing social justice and environmental sustainability.  Details at: http://www.bgi.edu/

Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Kelley School of Business offer a Social Entrepreneurship certificate program. http://kelley.iu.edu/mba/academics/socialEntrepreneurship.cfm

 

Social Enterprise Goes to Graduate School | Social Enterprise.

Obama Engages Muslim World With Entrepreneurship – Entrepreneurship and Development

President Obama is currently hosting a two day Presidential Summit with more than 250 business and social leaders from 50 countries, most with large or majority Muslim populations.

The summit is the follow up to Obama’s Cairo speech last summer and looks to use entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship, as major tools in increasing development throughout the Muslim world.

Many in the article claim that this is a nice thought, but that other issues – Iran nuclear policy, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel – matter far more.

From the piece;

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke opened the gathering by challenging the entrepreneurs to take “the tremendous success that all of you have had individually and expand it throughout the Islamic world.”

“There are over a billion people living in Muslim-majority countries today, and they represent a vast reserve of underutilized potential in the global economy, both in terms of their demands for goods and services as well as their ability to create technological and social innovations that will drive economic growth and social development,” Locke said.

Here is the official summit page and here is the official White House Press Briefing. BTW, it appears you can stream it live as well.

Obama Hosts Global Summit on Entrepreneurship – FoxSmallBusinessCenter.com.

Start-Ups Win With Plans to Displace Disposables | Social Ventures

Nice entry in the You’re the Boss Blog that highlights some winning social ventures in a recent competition sponsored by the William James Foundation — a foundation that encourages socially responsible for profits.

Winning entry (NURU Energy) presented via Skype and offers chargeable lights to replace the use of kerosene. They have a fascinating multilevel model using micro-financing that significantly increases entrepreneurship, employment, and living standards.

From the blog,

The grand prize of $6,000 and additional in-kind business services went to NURU Energy, which is also known as NURU Lights. The company makes rechargeable lights and portable power generators that are designed to displace the lanterns and carbon-emitting kerosene fuel still used in off-grid villages in developing nations.

A NURU task light or set of lights linked together can be recharged by solar or alternating-current power sources when they are available. But NURU’s POWERCycle also provides man-made electricity to charge them. The POWERCycle is a 1-foot-high, 1-foot-wide generator that sits in a simple wooden frame and operates like a stationary, recumbent bicycle. It can also be hand-cranked.

Start-Ups Win With Plans to Displace Disposables – You’re the Boss Blog – NYTimes.com.

Sparkseed Social Innovation Fund for Students Wins Financial Times Award

Just received the great news from our friends over at Sparkseed. They have won the Financial Times Best Social Investment strategy award against some pretty big hitters (McDonalds, The Gap, Microsoft). Sparkseed founder Mike Del Ponte explains, “Students have the creativity, passion, and drive to address issues like climate change, poverty, and global health through novel ventures. But they often lack the means to turn outside -the-box thinking into ideas that yield social dividends. Arming this untapped brain trust with the right resources will have untold benefits for society.”

Congrats to Mike and all of the social innovator and student entrepreneurs working with Sparkseed and to all who participated in the Financial Times – Just Means Social Innovation Awards.

Obama Launches Social Innovation Fund

After following Obama’s social entrepreneurship policy for over a year and watching it move along slowly, we have word that the Corporation for National and Community Service has launched the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) grant competition (here is their notice of funds availability). From the White House:

The SIF will direct funding through innovative, hands-on grant makers (or intermediaries) across the country.  These grant makers will identify fund and support over a period of years promising nonprofit organizations working in low-income communities.

It’s an approach that has clear benefits.

It leverages private funding from grant makers and others.  Each federal dollar will be matched with at least $3 of private funding, for a total of $200 million or greater.

It offers nonprofits critical support with respect to management, staffing, data collection, fundraising and other challenges that they will need to overcome as they grow.

It provides for investments in multiple nonprofits in an issue area or geography, allowing the best innovations to rise to the top.

eGov monitor – A Policy Dialogue Platform | Promoting Better Governance.

Is Social Entrepreneurship an Oxymoron: Sanjay Anandaram – India Chief Mentor – WSJ

Sanjay Anandaram offers a thought provoking piece about social entrepreneurship at the Wall Street Journal Online.  I agree with many of Anandaram’s thoughts on social entrepreneurship and highlighted a few of them below. This is a piece well worth reading.

Isn’t every business a social venture? After all, it pays taxes, generates employment and hopefully increases incomes of its stakeholders. So why the hoopla around social ventures, social entrepreneurship and social investing? Not surprisingly, social entrepreneurship is the latest victim of feel-good “buzz-word compliance,” an all too common disease in management. What was a business process improvement in the 80s is now a hotly debated incremental or quantum innovation; hiring someone who speaks a foreign language in a foreign location is part of the new and improved HR strategy; no self-respecting company will let go the opportunity to talk sustainability and social responsibility and Bottom Of the Pyramid (BOP) strategy!

The increased media focus and the casual throwing around of fashionable jargon serves some purposes -some useful and others not. It democratizes notions and concepts and makes them acceptable; it generates pressure to actually do something, however small, with a social angle; It can also however, unfortunately, trivialize the enormous challenges of having really meaningful social impact and make it just an agenda item for the next corporate event.

Later,

Various discussions are afoot on what constitutes social entrepreneurship. In my mind, a social venture is one where the dominant goal of the venture is to have social impact (e.g. jobs, enhanced incomes, health, education) with profits (to ensure sustainability) being only the means of achieving this social impact. Investors in the venture participate because they believe in the dominant goal, not because they want great returns through a successful IPO. There are other investment opportunities for investors seeking great returns. The entrepreneurship mindset determines the approach (e.g. scale, problem-solving) and culture (e.g. speed, efficiency, low cost, innovative) of this social venture.

Is Social Entrepreneurship an Oxymoron: Sanjay Anandaram – India Chief Mentor – WSJ.

4 Harvard Students Bring Energy/Soccer Social Venture

Found out about this super cool new social venture  from the most recent Springwise newsletter.

Soccket is a soccer ball for the developing world that also acts as an energy harvester. Each time a ball is impacted (by a kick, head, or bounce) energy is available. The Soccket collect the energy and it can be used by a variety of devices.

This venture was created a four person team during a Harvard engineering class where they were tasked

Harvard born Soccket is on to something fun and potential game changing.

with finding a problem and solving it. The hope is that the energy from the soccer balls will be used to power lights and the use of highly dangerous and pollutive kerosene will be diminished.

The team has done a few pilot study and appear to have further plans for expansion and beefing up their revenues. They are off to a great start and have been wise in approaching a market (soccer players in the developing world) that offers abundant upside.

I will post more when I learn more, but just received this one and thought I’d share. This looks to be an interesting new social venture.

Peter Drucker and Social Innovation

Was spending some time over at Changing Higher Education and was reading a post on higher education’s social responsibilities in a globalizing economy. A lot of the piece is about educating workers that satisfy the needs of today’s businesses. The post then went on to reference some of Peter Drucker’s writings and linked to a great article on Drucker by Michael Hiltzik  of the LA Times on Dec. 31, 2009. From Hiltzik:

Drucker’s most important insight concerned the role of the corporation in society. “The business enterprise is a creature of a society and an economy, and society or economy can put any business out of existence overnight,” he wrote in 1974. “The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job.”

From that simple observation sprung a wealth of further insights. It placed the corporation’s social responsibility in perspective by establishing its breadth and its limitations.

Drucker showed that there is no “inherent contradiction between profit and a company’s need to make a social contribution,” but that the former is indispensable to achieve the latter. He also warned that an enterprise that fails to “think through its impacts and its responsibilities” exposes itself to justified attack from social forces. Consumerism and environmentalism, he taught, are not enemies to be vanquished, but symptoms of business’ failure to understand its broad social role.

Startup Scramble DC University Challenge

Found out about this great opportunity from some of the people working on social entrepreneurship at GMU and Ashoka (read about the Campus Changemakers program at GMU here). The StartUp Scramble D.C. University Challenge takes place Jan 29th- 31st. According to the event site, “Entrepreneurial college students together in a weekend-long start-up event, work to pitch, plan, and launch sustainable ventures to improve society, which they will lead over the next year and beyond. ”

There will be great speakers, working sessions, and a pitch contest and it will likely be a pretty intense entrepreneurial experience as the participants look to get something on the up and running and making a social impact within a year. Winners receive funding and incubation services. Great networking is likely to take place. Looking forward to learning more and seeing what comes out of this.

Tom Friedman Calls for Year of “Start-Up America”

Just got an email from my friends at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) that Tom Friedman calls on President Obama to make 2010 the year of ‘Start-Up America’ as the cure for what ails us (and his political fortunes). Friedman suggests Obama turn to programs such as NFTE and National Lab Day that teach students about innovation, entrepreneurship, and science.

Friedman writes, “We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “’Start-Up America.'”

Here are some snippets describing the programs.

NFTE:

“NFTE works with middle- and high-school teachers to help them teach entrepreneurship. The centerpiece of its program is a national contest for start-ups with 24,000 kids participating. Each student has to invent a product or service, write up a business plan and then do it.”

National Lab Day:

“Introduced last November by a coalition of educators and science and engineering associations, Lab Day aims to inspire a wave of future innovators, by pairing veteran scientists and engineers with students in grades K-12 to inspire thousands of hands-on science projects around the country.

Any teacher in America, explains the entrepreneur Jack Hidary, the chairman of N.L.D., can go to the Web site NationalLabDay.org and enter the science project he or she is interested in teaching, or get an idea for one. N.L.D. will match teachers with volunteer scientists and engineers in their areas for mentoring.

‘As soon as you have a match, the scientists and the students communicate directly or via Skype and collaborate on a project,’ said Hidary.”

While Friedman doesn’t mention it directly, perhaps Obama’s Office of Social Innovation is talking with these groups. Anyone know if Sonal Shah (a former Google philanthropy director) has been active on these fronts?