Career Focus

SESC is tailored for individuals aiming to pioneer and lead positive and lasting change within various sectors, including social enterprises, government, and the private sector. Whether you aspire to launch or lead a social enterprise, innovate within policymaking and philanthropy, catalyze systemic change, or drive corporate social responsibility initiatives, this course provides the critical insights, frameworks and tools needed. Graduates will be well-positioned for roles that demand a deep understanding of leading and scaling social enterprises and designing and implementing solutions that drive measurable systemic change.

Who should take the course and why?

1. Aspiring social entrepreneurs (both for-profit and non-profit) who want to lead effective social enterprises that create impact and ultimately solve big social and environmental problems.
2. Business leaders who seek to influence the systems that can generate positive social change.
3. People whose work will be influenced by changing systems (e.g. climate, equality, healthcare, education), whether they are directly involved or not so they can better understand and make a positive contribution to the forces shaping their ecosystems.
4. People who are involved in systems change through a governance or advisory capacity, such as serving on non-profit boards, as a major donor, or in consulting roles.

Educational Objectives

1. Enhance your ability to critically analyze social enterprises and understand how to lead and scale them effectively.
2. Learn how to design and implement strategies that effectively address systemic problems that lie beyond the capacity of any single social enterprise or organization.
3. Gain insights into how different sectors can work together towards common goals, understanding the roles of policy, business, and non-profit organizations in driving systemic solutions.
4. Cultivate leadership skills necessary for navigating the challenges of social entrepreneurship and systemic change, focusing on resilience, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive strategy.
5. Create a community of students from across the university who are passionate about social and environmental change, and connect with over 500 alumni of the course, many of whom are building high growth social enterprises.

Course Overview

Social entrepreneurs don’t just build organizations, they change systems. This course will explore the frameworks, tools, mindsets, and best practices that successful social entrepreneurs use to maximize their impact. The course not only looks at social entrepreneurship through the lens of traditional entrepreneurship, but also asks how people motivated by disrupting entrenched and often inequitable systems differ from traditional entrepreneurs. We will look at differences in mindset and character; capacity for systems thinking; empathy in product/service design; and their ability to navigate diverse sources of capital to build either for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid organizations. SESC take a deep dive into how social entrepreneurs can become systems entrepreneurs by developing a coherent systems strategy, collaborating with others, building power, and mobilizing change.

Since the skills required to sustain effective engagement with social systems can differ subtly from the organizational management skills often deployed by social enterprises, the course also discusses the distinct leadership capabilities needed to sustain multi-stakeholder systems change efforts. The course features a diverse group of protagonists in diverse contexts (issues, geographies, stages, organizational forms), but asks students to go deep on a single social entrepreneur of their choice over the semester, culminating with an integrative final assignment that through a peer review process can lead to the development of a new case study for the class.

Course Modules

1. Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change: Overview of foundational concepts, mindsets of social entrepreneurs, and the importance of systems thinking as an intuitve lens to achieving long-lasting impact.
2. Designing for Systems Change: The process of developing and testing effective solutions to enduring problems through the idea of being proximate, using design thinking to identify needs, and understanding the role of positive deviance in identifying workable solutions.
3. Building and Scaling Social Enterprises: The steps to build social enterprises from identifying the right funding sources (venture philanthropy and impact investing), to developing strategies for direct scale and replication, to evaluation practices, to governing for excellence. The module concludes with cases that shift towards indirect approaches to scale via policy and mindset shifts.
4. Understanding Complex Challenges & Implementing System Solutions: Tools and frameworks for analyzing complex problems: stakeholder mapping, identifying leverage points, and designing context-specific solutions. Exploring effective strategies for influencing systemic change, including collaboration, innovation, and narrative shifting.
5. The Role of Business in Systems Change: Examines how business leaders can contribute to solving complex social issues in collaboration with government and nonprofit sectors.
6. Leadership for Systems Change: Insights into the personal and professional journey of systems leaders, including skill development, risk management, and the cultivation of resilience.

Assessment

Grades will be based on class participation (50%), and a final project (50%). The final project is a paper written in several parts that profiles a social enterprise of one’s choosing and using the tools and frameworks of the course, assess the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, with a peer review process to learn from one another’s work and propose a new case study for future iterations of the course.

Why This Course

SESC provides a holistic approach to tackling social and environmental problems. This course offers a unique opportunity to learn from both leading academics and experienced practitioners, inspiring students to become effective agents of change in their communities and beyond. The faculty are both experienced social entrepreneurs and systems change agents, who bring a wealth of real-world experience and insights into the classroom. The course structure is further enriched by extensive contributions from expert guests, ensuring that most classes feature talks and interactive sessions with leaders from various sectors. These practitioners will share their experiences, challenges, and strategies, providing students with unparalleled exposure to contemporary issues and solutions in the field of social entrepreneurship and systems change.

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