This course counts toward the following majors: Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Social Enterprise.

This course focuses on how social entrepreneurs use innovative, market-oriented approaches to address the world’s most challenging social and environmental problems. By seeking both social and financial outcomes, social entrepreneurs generate systematic change through sustainable solutions. They disrupt assumptions and conventional business models and define new frontiers of value creation. Often defined as “unreasonable,” social entrepreneurs challenge paradigms and innovate to suggest new ideas and radical solutions to existing problems. By adopting a market-orientation, social entrepreneurs create performance-driven approaches to tacking social and environmental problems that result in a sustainable venture. They use commercial markets or a commercial approach to address social issues or utilize sound business principles in their method. The course will provide a survey of social entrepreneurship including best practices in models, measurement and financing. The course will be co-taught by leading experts in the field including Wes Selke, Investment Manager for Good Capital, Sonal Shah, Tides Fellow and former Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and Greg Casagrande, Founder of South Pacific Development Microfinance Network.

Social Entrepreneurship (SEEK-452-0)

This course counts toward the following majors: Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Social Enterprise.

This course focuses on how social entrepreneurs use innovative, market-oriented approaches to address the world’s most challenging social and environmental problems. By seeking both social and financial outcomes, social entrepreneurs generate systematic change through sustainable solutions. They disrupt assumptions and conventional business models and define new frontiers of value creation. Often defined as “unreasonable,” social entrepreneurs challenge paradigms and innovate to suggest new ideas and radical solutions to existing problems. By adopting a market-orientation, social entrepreneurs create performance-driven approaches to tacking social and environmental problems that result in a sustainable venture. They use commercial markets or a commercial approach to address social issues or utilize sound business principles in their method. The course will provide a survey of social entrepreneurship including best practices in models, measurement and financing. The course will be co-taught by leading experts in the field including Wes Selke, Investment Manager for Good Capital, Sonal Shah, Tides Fellow and former Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and Greg Casagrande, Founder of South Pacific Development Microfinance Network

NUvention: Innovate for Impact I (SEEK-930-0)

This course counts toward the following majors: Social Enterprise, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, International Business

Innovate for Impact (I4I) bringing together diverse individuals and their unique skill sets, disciplines and cultures to design innovative market-based solutions to the world’s toughest problems, including poverty, disease and hunger. I4I consist of both curricular and laboratory components that teach user-centered design as an integral element of product and service development. The curriculum provide the tools and frameworks needed to understand the user, evaluate market demand, create and assess a prototype, design a business model, assemble a business plan and solicit funding. The full course requires completing a series of courses, SEEK 930 and SEEK 931A, and two weeks of in-country field work. Teams will spend ten weeks in the classroom (SEEK 930-0), followed by two weeks on the ground understanding their customer, market, distribution channels and stakeholders. Using the learnings from field work, teams will then return for five weeks in the classroom (SEEK 931A) where they will dive into the nuts-and-bolts of launching an impact venture. The course will conclude with an investor pitch day, where teams have the opportunity to pitch their business concepts to impact investors from the Midwest. The classroom component of SEEK-930-0 will include the foundations of social entrepreneurship, the cultural context of work in resource-limited settings, the application of design thinking principles to addressing social justice issues, nonmarket contexts and social network mapping, best practices in social venture business models and the application of positive psychology for social entrepreneurs. Note: This course is admittance by application only and may not be dropped after the first week of the quarter.

NUvention: Innovate for Impact II (SEEK-931-0)

This course counts toward the following majors: Social Enterprise, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, International Business

Innovate for Impact (I4I) bringing together diverse individuals and their unique skill sets, disciplines and cultures to design innovative market-based solutions to the world’s toughest problems, including poverty, disease and hunger. I4I consist of both curricular and laboratory components that teach user-centered design as an integral element of product and service development. The curriculum provide the tools and frameworks needed to understand the user, evaluate market demand, create and assess a prototype, design a business model, assemble a business plan and solicit funding. The full course requires completing a series of courses, SEEK 930 and SEEK 931A, and two weeks of in-country field work. Teams will spend ten weeks in the classroom (SEEK 930-0), followed by two weeks on the ground understanding their customer, market, distribution channels and stakeholders. Using the learnings from field work, teams will then return for five weeks in the classroom (SEEK 931A) where they will dive into the nuts-and-bolts of launching an impact venture. The course will conclude with an investor pitch day, where teams have the opportunity to pitch their business concepts to impact investors from the Midwest. The classroom component of SEEK-931-A will include legal structures for social ventures, the impactions of financing on structure and strategy, how to measure social impact, communication of impact and value proposition to different stakeholders and how to scale your venture. The final deliverable, a business plan and pitch will also be due at the end of the term. Note: This course is a continuation of SEEK-930-0 and is admittance by application only.