Current course offerings

Please Note: Course profiles marked as not available may still be in development.

Course description

This course provides students with the opportunity to research, discuss and critically reflect upon the existing landscape and impact of social enterprises and not-for-profits. Social enterprises and not-for-profits endeavour to blend two strands of thinking and action: One is the social mission of serving public interest and the community, while the other includes introduction of for-profit business practices. The aim of the course is to enable students (in team work) to identify social impact solutions that are effective in both strands, understand how they work as well as analyse and recommend ways to scale them. Thus, it complements the courses TIMS7329 Social Entrepreneurship in Practice and TIMS7331 Entrepreneurship Incubator that focus on developing new social enterprises from students' social innovations. While the creation of innovative solutions to social or environmental problems remains an imperative task, without a solid understanding of the complexity of social issues as well as the variety and effectiveness of proposed solutions, we risk reinventing the wheel while the potential of existing but unexploited solutions lies bare. As former U.S. President Bill Clinton noted "Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up." Furthermore, the aim of this course is to develop a new generation of responsible and mindful business leaders capable of managing the complex challenges faced by business and society in the 21st century.

Archived offerings