INNO9004 Innovation for Social Impact: Doing Good While Doing Well GE

2020

4.5

Specific contact hours for each topic include

• 3 x Full day intensive workshop immersions and
• 1 x full day application workshop

Attendance is also required at a number of additional course level full day application workshops.

INNO2001 has been successfully completed

None

Core topic

Assessments,Projects, Tests

This topic inspires students to apply creativity, entrepreneurial thinking and analytic tools to create durable solutions to societal challenges, locally, nationally and globally. It appears that a business oriented around a mission or purpose can create competitive advantage, as it encourages customers to want to purchase from them, employees to want to work for them and partners to want to collaborate with them. Whether starting a mission-oriented, for-profit, social impact venture or transforming a charity or government department to become opportunity driven, accountable to measurable impacts and beholden to financial discipline, social ventures have proven to be a powerful approach to solving social problems. Students explore how social entrepreneurs apply an entrepreneurial mindset of innovation, risk taking and large scale transformation to social problem solving. Project driven, students will extend on their economic analysis, by applying practical (social media) interactive tools for story-telling, spreading the word and community building.

Aim is to develop a better understanding of the role of the social enterprise and social innovation in creating business opportunities that deliver social impact within a sustainable society. How can a social venture better solve, `customer jobs to be done? Students will learn how to create and test value propositions and apply early stage product/market development skills, tools and techniques facilitated by a blend of lectures, discussions, cases, readings, video material, workshops and expert guest speakers.

Students develop their ability to tackle unfamiliar problems within individual and group challenges. Working collaboratively in diverse groups they will be given the opportunity to articulate and present their research and findings, demonstrating social sensitivity and a framework for ethical reasoning. Students will be encouraged to exercise intellectual independence to be critical and reflective learners and use the growing experience with social entrepreneurship to enhance strategic, management and innovation skills.

On successful completion of this topic students should be able to:

• Describe and illustrate the key concepts underlying social entrepreneurship and innovation, whether at the local, national or global scale
• Identify how social enterprises are change makers and explain the role of social innovation in creating sustainable business opportunities
• Choose and apply a variety of tools specific to the design, management and evaluation of social ventures
• Understand role of stakeholder management and governance
• Identify, analyse and propose solutions to the special challenges involved in managing multiple bottom-line organisations
• Make distinctions between various social business models for impact
• Review the economics and funding of social enterprises and understand how social ventures measure success
• Design strategies to connect tribes, create communities and spread the word, in order to design, test, evaluate and pitch a social venture
• Apply social media and story-telling tools, to create a social media presence of the social venture in order to gather feedback and test the value proposition