Master’s degrees in business administration (MBAs) are expensive. Only a small percentage of people worldwide can afford them, and many graduates are saddled with debt that makes straying from the conventional corporate path difficult once they earn the degree. As corporations begin to take real steps toward sustainability, more opportunities exist for those who want to combine business careers with social justice and a net neutral impact on the planet’s ecosystem, but it is still outside of corporate life where the heart of social entrepreneurship beats. And, it is generally outside of the corporate context where the management lessons relevant to aspiring social entrepreneurs are to be learned. So how and where do people learn the professional management skills of the social entrepreneur?
Generally speaking they learn the old fashioned way: by doing it. But a growing number of formal avenues affiliated with universities provide people with meaningful learning experiences either while they are students, or after they are on the job, by teaming students and practitioners to cultivate real social enterprises. One of the secrets to the apparent success of these avenues is the relationship between students and mentors—whether the mentors are seasoned businesspeople coaching a team of aspiring entrepreneurs, or other professionals for whom the students are attempting to solve business problems.
“The World is Our Classroom” — This motto of The School of Business at Thammasat University in Bangkok is literally true when it comes to teaching social entrepreneurship. Thammasat’s Global Entrepreneurship program has teamed with the country’s National Laboratories in an experiment to see if students can simultaneously learn about the management of technology, particularly tech with significant potential health and environmental benefits, and help technologies from the labs “cross the chasm” to reach the market. But not only is the program enabling the MBA students to learn skills they will need in the working world, it is also providing researchers who have developed noteworthy innovations a chance to see their research applied, and so to acquire a practical perspective on how the theoretical benefits of their work might be realized. Ed Rubesch, PhD, Director of the Global Entrepreneurship Program, was asked to take on the role of helping the National Laboratories with technology transfer, and saw the opportunity to build a bridge between the MBA, research and commercial worlds that might both give technologies a chance to be piloted to bring them closer to viability, and to teach MBA students practical skills.
His insight was informed in part through his work developing the South East Asia regional hub of the Global Social Venture Competition, which he leads with Pattraporny Yamla-Or (or “Dao” for short), a Thammasat graduate and GSVC prizewinner. Dao had intended to launch the venture she and her teammates took the prize for in 2007 (which sought to help a renowned Thai dentist/inventor commercialize her patented remedy for periodontal disease in a way that combined high-margin sales with subsidized treatment in low-income regions). Although Dao and her colleagues’ aspirations were thwarted by difficulties negotiating the rights to the intellectual property, instead she channeled her passion into building one of the most vital partnerships in the Global Social Venture Competition’s global network. She and Ed are using the GSVC-South East Asia as a platform to cultivate awareness of the concept of social entrepreneurship in a region where most businesses are still multigenerational family-owned affairs and giving back to the community often stops with donations to build temples.
Dozens if not hundreds of business plan competitions for social ventures have sprung up in the past ten years around the world, with abundant opportunities for mentors and students to learn from one another. With leadership like Dao and Ed’s, the implications for management education are significant enough to begin to speak to the top concern facing nearly every institution today: its ability to attract funds.
Consider the advice of David Kyle, former Citigroup executive and now CEO of the Indian School Finance Company (ISFC), a company that lends at market rates to private schools that provide high quality education to middle class and poor schoolchildren in India. Kyle has been advocating for more deliberate matchmaking between experienced business mentors and student teams competing in the Global Social Venture Competition-Asia Region out of Hyderabad’s Indian School of Business (ISB). “Hyderabad could easily be considered one of the world’s social entrepreneurship epicenters,” he said recently while doing his weekly rounds to visit the schools in the ISFC portfolio. ISB as the premiere MBA program in the region would seem to be a natural partner. However up until now the administration of the ISB has focused on rising in the rankings, and appears not to have recognized how central social entrepreneurship, and well-structured real-world learning opportunities for students interested in it, may be to that goal.
Meanwhile back in the heart of Silicon Valley, as many of you know (since they’re about to announce the entrepreneurs selected to participate in the Class of 2009 here!) Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator (SCU’s GSBI) has emerged as the world’s premiere social entrepreneurship learning laboratory: the incubator combines a 2-week intensive summer workshop with pre-work accomplished remotely in collaboration with SCU MBA students who take a social entrepreneurship course for credit on campus, and ongoing support from seasoned business managers in the Santa Clara area. Many of the GSBI’s entrepreneurs have never developed financial statements or a business plan before attending the program, even though they may already be reaching millions of constituents. “I’m basically teaching using living business cases” in the MBA course, says SCU’s Eric Carlson, himself a veteran Silicon Valley management executive cum social entrepreneur who helped create the GSBI. MBA students and Silicon Valley mentors alike test their marketing, finance, strategy and operations mettle against the emerging market realities within which the GSBI entrepreneurs operate. “It’s the living cases that make the course a success.”
SCU’s MBA students have successfully lobbied to begin the process of incorporating the social entrepreneurship course into the program’s core curriculum. The GSBI was awarded a 3-year, $1.08 million Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2008, its sixth year of operations. And recently when Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus visited the region, he did not choose the nearby top ranked-Stanford for his speech—he chose SCU. MBA deans looking to the future, take note.
This entry was originally published on the Skoll Foundation’s SocialEdge.org website on our other blog – SVT on Impact.