CEMS COMMUNITY Academic Members & Faculty CEMS Faculty Groups Ordered List Social EntrepreneurshipSocial Entrepreneurship (S-ENT)
The domain of social change is no longer reserved to scholars and teachers in the fields ofpolitical sciences and development studies. Increasingly business students are recognized aspossessing important skills that can drive social change. This new discipline is often referredto as Social Entrepreneurship (S-ENT) (Mair, Robinson, & Hockerts, 2006; Nicholls, 2006;Perrini, 2006). S-ENT describes the discovery and sustainable exploitation of opportunitiesto create public goods usually through the generation of disequilibria in market and non-market envi-ronments (Hockerts, 2007). The S-ENT process can in some cases lead to thecreation of social enterprises (Dees & Elias, 1998; Hulgard, 2006). These social ventures arehybrid organizations exhi-biting characteristics of both the for-profit and not-for profit sector.Individuals engaging in S-ENT are usually referred to as social entrepreneurs, a term thatdescribes resourceful individuals working to create social innovation (Drayton, 2002; Mair &Noboa, 2006). They do not only have to identify (or create) opportunities for social change(that so far have been unexploited), they must also muster the resources necessary to turnthese opportunities into reality.
A typical example is Prof. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank (Bangladesh)and recipient of the Nobel Peace price in recognition of his contribution to povertyalleviation through the invention and popularization of Micro-finance. Other examplesinclude fair trade or car-sharing. Today many foundations aim to identify and promote socialentrepreneurs. Two pro-minent examples are Ashoka and the Skoll Foundation. So calledventure philanthropists adopt methods from the domain of venture capital, for example,encouraging social entrepreneurs to provide detailed business plans and to measure and reportsystematically on their social performance. Social Return on Investment (S-ROI) analysisis an example, for an emerging tool aiming to describe the social impact of S-ENT in dollarterms, relative to the philanthropic investment made.
Objectives of the new Faculty Group:
- Firstly, we want to increase the number of CEMS block seminars offered in the area of S-ENT. So far only Bocconi has begun to offer courses on this topic (Sept 2011). From this we hope to grow towards other CEMS schools.
- Furthermore, we want to exchange teaching methods between the schools currently offering S-ENT courses. Electives so far are offered at CBS, HEC, Bocconi as well as other CEMS schools. Here two goals predominate:
- Engage students in social innovation and the start-up of social enterprises.
- Prepare students to join existing social enterprises.
- The faculty group will also work on developing content for existing social entrepreneurs. To date very few such courses exist.
- Another project will be the promotion among CEMS students of minors/ specializations in S-ENT as they are currently offered for example by HEC and CBS.
- We will also pay particular attention to collaboration at the PhD level. This will include cooperation between doctoral projects at the different CEMS schools as well as joint (credit-bearing) PhD courses in the area of S-ENT.
- With a midterm view we aim at the development and launch of joint research projects. In particular we envision the establishment of a CEMS-wide database of social enterprises which would be open to all CEMS scholars.
- Finally, we will aim to work with leading S-ENT networks (contacts exoist already with organizations such as Ashoka, UnLtd, Kaospilots) to bring in more practitioners into the CEMS school networks and thereby into education and research.
