29.08.2022
Dear students,
We are pleased to invite you to join a collaborative, cross-institution course in social entrepreneurship, where student teams ideate and develop models for social enterprises. Social entrepreneurship means building new organizations that offer scalable solutions to social and environmental challenges. Social enterprise can be either for-profit, or non-profit, but key is the ambition to address societal problems at scale.
Bard students will engage with classes from Bangladesh, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan, Taiwan, Bulgaria, the US, China and Lithuania through a mixture of synchronous on-line learning, and in-person labs. The course will culminate in a “shark tank for sustainability” among and between teams from the different universities, with winning teams then competing at the Bard MBA’s annual Disrupt to Sustain pitch competition in December. The practice of social entrepreneurship explores the full suite of liberal learning: critical analysis, persuasive writing, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, design thinking, and group social dynamics.
The course will include readings and discussion focused on social issues related to entrepreneurship: drivers of change, from decarbonization to AI; delinking growth from material throughput; urban-based innovation ecosystems; social obstacles to risk taking; working on multi-disciplinary teams; language, power, race and gender dynamics in entrepreneurship; deconstructing the archetypes of entrepreneurship.
The course starts at the beginning of October (October 3rd-December 12th) and will be held entirely in English. The certification program is conducted with the support of the master's program “Responsible and Sustainable Governance”.
Participation is free, after a competition.
- To register, please complete the following application form: https://forms.office.com/r/4653aRmqjW
Applications are accepted no later than September 26th.
The pilot edition of the course will include 15 participants, who will be selected on a competitive basis. Their evaluation will be done based on the data from the application form.
Selection criteria:
- Personal motivation to complete the course
- Willingness to work on own (social or business) entrepreneurial idea
- Maturity of the entrepreneurial idea
- Fluency in English
Course duration: 3 hours/week – 1.5 hours online in a global classroom and 1.5 hours face-to-face in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
Credits: 3 (for students in the master's program “Responsible and Sustainable Governance”).