Creating Social Value

In its traditional form, social entrepreneurship is mostly dealing with developing countries and health, education or income related issues of the poor and socially neglected groups of people. As such, social entrepreneurship projects have often been followed and partly managed or organized by international non-profit organizations. However, current trends and developments point towards an increased interest of entrepreneurs in starting social ventures that contribute to social development and the society while also generating profit. As such, social entrepreneurs face the challenge to balance social topics and ideas with business models targeted towards generating revenue and surplus. In this course, we look at new forms of social entrepreneurship and focus on entrepreneurial opportunities that deal with current social issues and challenges. While social entrepreneurship has emerged from projects in countries in e.g. Africa or India, this course also looks at social topics in Europe, Germany and other developed countries. Jointly, we identify important social topics that, for instance, deal with unemployment, financial illiteracy, immigration, the homeless, sick or care for the elderly. We discuss the question: What is the future of the social enterprise? And, can profit orientation help to solve social issues or does it rather harm the original intentions of social projects?

In the course we use methods and tools to apply "evidence based entrepreneurship". These methods mainly come from design thinking and customer development and help social entrepreneurs to investiate social problems and social segments using real data and insights. We develop assumptions and test them, using primary and secondary data.

Thus, this course provides a useful framework for students that
1) want to focus on social entrepreneurship and learn more about the functioning of socially responsible ventures and social business models and/or
2) want to complement skills they have gained in other entrepreneurship courses that deal with idea generation, business modeling or business planning.

Main components of the course are:
" Identification of social topics, networks, organizations
" Learning from social entrepreneurship cases
" Identifying and developing a unique social opportunity
" Understanding and describing social value
" Learning to evaluate social ventures and their scalability
" Understanding/addressing concepts of sharing economy

Grading:
Final presentation of group project (group work): 50 %
Reflection paper (individual): 40 %
In-class participation: 10 %

We draw on literature dealing with social entrepreneurship and social enterprises, the entrepreneurial process, opportunity identification and evaluation, and social business model generation.

We furthermore use design thinking and business model canvas tools.