Social Entrepreneurship

This course introduces you to cutting-edge concepts, frameworks and practices that are current in social entrepreneurship, as well as critical issues in business ethics as a knowledge foundation for analysing and practicing social entrepreneurship. The course considers how social entrepreneurship plays out in organizations ranging from conventional companies seeking to adopt corporate social responsibility practices to double-bottom-line businesses and social enterprises. The course specifies strategic and implementation tensions inherent in aligning business and social/environmental values, and provides frameworks with which to analyse and resolve the tensions at play. This course trains you into a quasi-expert of social entrepreneurship by enabling them to apply frameworks to making tough decisions in real business contexts. The course includes four modules: strategic corporate social responsibility (SCSR); double-bottom-line business (DBL), social enterprise (SE) and business ethics (BE). It begins by analysing and making decisions on the cases of conventional companies conducting social innovation initiatives through SCSR and DBL. We will then move to explore the cases of social enterprises. You will observe both the common and distinctive challenges facing conventional companies and social enterprises. The modules of SCSR, DBL and SE will be followed by an Entrepreneur Panel where social entrepreneurs introduce their initiatives and engage in a highly interactive conversation with students. The course will finish by taking a look at business ethics theories and issues that provide analytical depth and clarification to your understanding of social entrepreneurship.