Applied Social Entrepreurship

Background
Social innovations include ideas, concepts, processes and organizations that focus on societal needs. Social entrepreneurship can be understood as the process of identifying and starting a new business venture to address a pressing public and societal need. This course starts by exposing students to pressing societal needs, then introduces them to the concepts and techniques associated with human centered design for social innovation. Through a combination of methods, such as ideation, prototyping and applied business modeling, students learn and design robust and sustainable startups. Social entrepreneurship draws on many subjects and requires a multi-disciplinary approach, and a number of possible topics could be covered in class, emphasis will be placed on practical tools that can help the creation and setup of social startups.

Teaching
Class sessions combine lectures, interactive exercises, simulations, group

Strategy
Presentations and discussions. The diversity of approaches seek to enhance students’ technical, decision-making, problem-solving and practical skills. To achieve these goals in an effective way, it is important to engage in and prepare for discussion; participate actively during class discussions; and review readings and assignments for their applicability of concepts covered in class.

Objectives
Introduce students to the principles and practices of social entrepreneurship. Adopt a Human Center Design (HCD) approach as a driving force to guide students through the different design process stages, such as discover, ideate and prototype. Expose students to the real challenges they would face when they create a start-up and provide them with a strategic toolkit to address those challenges. Provide students with the necessary tools and training required to help them become social entrepreneurs.

Course Structure
The course will be divided in 3 major stages. Each stage is strategically organized to focus on a subset of relevant topics. At the end of each stage (ideation, prototyping, and business creation), students present their projects and receive significant feedback from experts and peers (stage gates). At the end of the course, groups present the business case for their social startups to the CPStartup jury members for incubation. Total course credit is 6 ECTS (14 weeks, 4 hours/week).