Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation by Design

This course is designed to help students understand and make their own mark in today’s revolution in how to innovate.  Although the world still needs dedicated innovators of all kinds to create the new combinations of ideas for solving to difficult social problems, this course is based on the notion that durable social change depends on five tools for innovating in how to innovate: (1) innovative social exploring to call others to action and identify the root cause that needs to be addressed, (2) innovative social finance to leverage existing funding toward high-impact investment (and divestment) and create innovative ways to prospect for funding and impact, (3) innovative social design to collect ideas that might be pieced together to redress a seemingly intractable problem and combine, test, and launch those ideas, (4) innovative social advocacy to frame the debate in favor of the specific innovation and codify these ideas for sustainable implementation, and (5) innovative social delivery to scale new combinations of ideas to maximum effect, and operate at scale through strong organizations that change as needed to produce impact and defend it from inevitable opposition. 

Just because we need innovations in these tools does not mean that existing methods are no longer needed—the key is to find ways to fine-tune what we already have to make it work as effectively as possible in an ever-changing ecosystem. The course will ask students to explore these tools using their own experience and concerns as a frame for viewing innovations in how to innovate as essential to their own success in changing the world as it is today into the world as they think it should become.