COURSE NUMBER: MBA292N.2

COURSE TITLE: Social Entrepreneurship

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2

INSTRUCTOR: Jane Wei-Skillern

E-MAIL ADDRESS: jane_wei@haas.berkeley.edu

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION: http://bspace.berkeley.edu

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 PM

PREREQUISITE(S): none

CLASS FORMAT: Cases

REQUIRED READINGS: Cases

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Class participation and project

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:

As the intensity and complexity of social and environmental problems has grown in recent years , social entrepreneurship, defined as innovative, social value creating activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit, government or business sectors, has become  increasingly prominent.  While virtually all enterprises, commercial and social, generate social value, fundamental to this definition is that the primary focus of social entrepreneurship is to achieve social impact above all else.   How can organizations achieve greater social impact through social entrepreneurship?  Oftentimes growth seems to be the answer.  Without a doubt, many nonprofits have achieved significant impact by going to scale.  Yet, the process of organizational growth also poses tremendous challenges.  Even when organizations manage to overcome the many obstacles to growth, and achieve appreciable scale, this approach is seldom sufficient to achieve significant social impact on its own.  ASI explores how to utilize social entrepreneurship to generate  social impact as efficiently, effectively, and sustainably as possible through two primary means:  1) through organizational level growth and innovation and 2) through network approaches which require the mobilization of a vast array of actors and resources, but have the potential to generate rapid and sustained social impact.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:

Jane Wei-Skillern is a visiting assistant professor at Haas and a lecturer in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  Prior to relocating to California, she was on the  faculty at Harvard Business School in the Social Enterprise Initiative where she taught social entrepreneurship and nonprofit strategy courses in MBA and Executive programs at HBS, and the MPA program at the Kennedy School of Government.

Professor Wei-Skillern is the author and co-author of dozens of HBS case studies, book chapters, and journal articles. She is the lead author of the casebook Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector (Sage Publications, 2007) with colleagues Jim Austin, Herman Leonard, and Howard Stevenson. Her research on the leadership and management of social enterprises examines the topics of nonprofit growth and management of multi-site nonprofits, and most recently has been focused on nonprofit networks. This latter research on nonprofit networks examines how nonprofit leaders that focus less on building their own institutions and instead invest to build strategic networks beyond their organizational boundaries can achieve dramatic gains in mission impact with the same or fewer resources. This research explores networks at the level of funders, governing boards, and nonprofit CEOs.

While at Haas, she will be teaching an MBA elective this Spring entitled, Achieving Social Impact, which explores how to deliver on mission impact by mobilizing resources not only via social enterprise organizations themselves, but also through building networks.   The course, based on her seven years of teaching and research on social entrepreneurship and nonprofit networks at HBS will be taught entirely by the case method.