Social Entrepreneurship

This is a collaborative, cross-institution course in social entrepreneurship, where student teams ideateand develop models for social enterprises. Social entrepreneurship is the process of building new organizations that offer scalable solutions to social and environmental challenges. Social enterprisecan be either for-profit, or non-profit. The course features a global classroom, with students enrolled convening each week in a common zoom space to share ideas. Participating schools include BRACUniversity in Bangladesh, Al Quds University in Palestine, the American Universities of Central Asia (inKyrgyzstan) and of Bulgaria, Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, and Bard. Past certificate courses have incubated powerful social business ideas in Bangladesh and Palestine. The course will culminate in a “shark tank for sustainability” among and between teams from the different universities, with winning teams then competing at the Bard MBA’s annual Disrupt to Sustain pitch competition in December. The course includes readings and discussion focused on social issues related to entrepreneurship: drivers of change, from decarbonization to AI; delinking growth from material throughput; urban-based innovation ecosystems; social obstacles to risk taking; working on multi-disciplinary teams; language, power and gender dynamics in entrepreneurship; deconstructing the archetypes of entrepreneurship. The practice of social entrepreneurship explores the full suite of liberal learning: critical analysis, persuasive writing, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, design thinking, and group social dynamics.