Reflections and Insights on Teaching Social Entrepreneurship: An

Reflections and Insights onTeaching Social

Entrepreneurship:An Interview With Greg Dees

ERIN L. WORSHAMDuke University

Greg Dees is often referred to as the “Father of Social Entrepreneurship Education.” Overthe past 20 years, he has taught social entrepreneurship courses in some of the UnitedStates’ top business schools, including Harvard, Stanford, and now at Duke. As interest insocial entrepreneurship skyrockets and more universities engage in socialentrepreneurship education, Professor Dees’ insights on teaching and building academicprograms are valuable for others to learn from and build on. This interview capturesProfessor Dees’ reflections on the history of social entrepreneurship education, hisinsights into what works best, where we are still lacking in our teaching pedagogy, andwhat the future might hold.

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In 2004, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, then dean of theLondon Business School, wrote, “Just a decade ago,there were virtually no B-school courses or studentprojects on social entrepreneurship. Today mosttop business schools have both” (Tyson, 2004).Since Tyson made that statement, the number ofprograms being offered and demand for those pro-grams has continued to skyrocket. As of 2011, morethan 148 institutions were teaching some aspect ofsocial entrepreneurship on their campuses (Kim &Leu, 2011). Mainstream media is covering thisgrowing trend (see Guttenplan, 2011; Murray, 2009;and others), social entrepreneurship business plancompetitions are common, and demand from stu-dents is continuing to increase. As an example, NetImpact—a San Francisco-based nonprofit thatmanages a network of more than 30,000 “change-makers using their careers to tackle the world’stoughest problems”—now has more than 300 stu-dent and professional chapters worldwide, includ-

ing chapters at the world’s top business schoolsand undergraduate campuses (Net Impact, 2012.

These colleges and universities play a criticalrole in preparing the next generation of social en-trepreneurs and social innovators who will usetheir skills to solve global issues. As the field con-tinues to grow, reflecting on the past, learning fromits lessons, and continuing to improve how weeducate and prepare those future leaders will becritical. I can think of no one better than ProfessorGreg Dees—often referred to as the “Father of So-cial Entrepreneurship Education”—to reflect on thegrowth of social entrepreneurship education andthose lessons learned.

Dees has been involved in the movement from thestart. He has been studying and teaching social en-trepreneurship for approximately 20 years and in2007 was honored with the first Lifetime Achieve-ment Award in Social Entrepreneurship Educationby the Aspen Institute and Ashoka. Dees is widelyrecognized for his ground-breaking thought leader-ship, including his seminal article, “The Meaning ofSocial Entrepreneurship,” which is likely one of themost cited in the field (Dees, 1998).

In addition to his research contributions, Deesdeveloped and taught the first known social entre-preneurship course in the United States andhelped to found some of the world’s premier aca-

I would like to thank Greg Dees for his willingness to partici-pate in and help frame this interview. Even more importantly,my sincere gratitude to him for his ongoing mentorship andthought leadership. His passion and commitment to educatingthe next generation of social entrepreneurs and solving theworld’s greatest challenges is an inspiration to me and count-less others around the world.

� Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2012, Vol. 11, No. 3, 442–452. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amle.2011.0024

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demic centers on social entrepreneurship. Whileon the faculty of Harvard Business School, Deeshelped launch the Initiative on Social Enterpriseand received the 1995 Apgar Award for Innovationin Teaching for his course, Entrepreneurship in theSocial Sector. At Stanford University, he served asthe Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professorand co-founder of the Center for Social Innovationand also developed and taught MBA and under-graduate courses on social entrepreneurship, anexecutive program, High Impact Philanthropy, anda law school seminar on nonprofit law, economics,and strategy. Finally, Dees moved to Duke Univer-sity in 2001 and founded the Center for the Ad-vancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE), aresearch and education center dedicated to pro-moting the entrepreneurial pursuit of social impactthrough the thoughtful adaptation of business ex-pertise. Dees is now working on a forthcomingbook tentatively entitled, The Innovative Society:Harnessing the Power of Social Entrepreneurs toMake Societies More Resilient and Adaptive.

I interviewed Greg Dees in August 2011 to learnfrom his deep experience and gather his insightson the teaching of social entrepreneurship. We be-gan our interview by reflecting on the history andorigins of social entrepreneurship education in theUnited States. We have much to learn from reflect-ing on the growth of other fields, for example, thegrowth of entrepreneurship (Stevenson, 2000), butthere are also lessons to be learned in our ownfield’s history. Professor Dees has a unique per-spective, having taught some of the first classes onsocial entrepreneurship, and I was interested toknow what the challenges were in those earlydays. As more faculty attempt to implement socialentrepreneurship courses on their campuses andthe academic field continues to grow, what can welearn from this history? Dees also identifies someearly lessons that are still relevant today—for ex-ample, student demand being the driving forcebehind innovation and curricular change, aligningsocial entrepreneurship themes with other disci-plines, including implementing social entrepre-neurial case studies in a variety of courses, andcasting a wide net in terms of the students that youare attracting and educating.

I then wanted to explore more deeply the evolu-tion of his teaching pedagogy and the similaritiesand distinctions between teaching commercialand social entrepreneurship. This topic has beenstudied in several academic inquiries. For exam-ple, Tracey and Phillips note: “Social entrepre-neurs therefore encounter the same challenges asmore traditional entrepreneurs—opportunity rec-ognition, the marshalling of resources, and the cre-

ation of the new venture (Kourilsky, 1995)—with theadded complexity of defining, building support for,and achieving social outcomes” (Tracey & Phillips,2007: 266). They go on to identify three key chal-lenges that are unique to social entrepreneurs:managing accountability, managing the doublebottom line, and managing identity (Tracey & Phil-lips, 2007). Dacin, Dacin, and Matear focus on theunique nature of social entrepreneurs regardingthe processes and resources used (relational, cul-tural, institutional), and the primary mission andoutcomes leveraged (Dacin, Dacin, & Matear, 2010).Finally, Austin, Stevenson, and Wei-Skillern (2006)conducted a comparative analysis of commercialand social entrepreneurship, finding distinctionsfor social entrepreneurs around four main areas:market failure, mission, resource mobilization, andperformance measurement. What does Dees see asthe distinctions between commercial and socialentrepreneurs and how does this play out in termsof course content or pedagogy?

Finally, we concluded the interview by discuss-ing a few of the trends that are being seen in thefield today which will have a large impact on theevolution of social entrepreneurship education.This includes the trend of social entrepreneurshipprograms shifting from their original home withinbusiness schools, to becoming prevalent in under-graduate and a variety of graduate programs, in-cluding engineering, law, public policy, socialwork, and many more. Notably, although Dees hasspent his career teaching mainly within the busi-ness school context, he questioned whether busi-ness schools are the “right place” for social entre-preneurship education. We also discussed thechallenge of measuring impact and the promise ofsocial entrepreneurship as learning laboratoriesfor society, issues that deserve special attentiongoing forward.

You have the unique perspective of having beeninvolved in the social entrepreneurship educationmovement from the beginning. That movementstarted at business schools and is now expandingto other programs. Why do you think businessschools were such a natural breeding ground forsocial entrepreneurship education, instead ofpublic policy schools, or social work schools, orothers?

Actually, I am not sure business schools as insti-tutions were such a natural breeding ground. Inmy experience, there was a lot of resistance in thebeginning. It was often the students who reallypushed the agenda and eventually got social en-trepreneurship courses included in their schools.

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My own first experience with social entrepre-neurship education was actually in a kind of hy-brid setting that was more naturally accepting ofthis type of education.

What do you mean a “hybrid setting”?

I am talking specifically about the Yale School ofManagement in its early days, before it gave anMBA. Back then, it mixed business, government,and nonprofit in one program and awarded a mas-ter’s in public and private management (MPPM).

I have an MPPM from Yale and, after working forMcKinsey for several years, returned to Yale toembark on my teaching career in the mid-1980s. Myfirst exposure to teaching social entrepreneurshiphappened by accident shortly thereafter. It wasn’teven called social entrepreneurship at the time. Acolleague of mine went on leave and so the schoolasked me to take over his course on “ManagingSmaller Organizations,” a course in which stu-dents would work with small for-profits or nonprof-its in the community. But I didn’t have the networkand could not come up with the clients quicklyenough. So I turned it in to a course on new ven-tures and had the students develop business plansfor their own organizations, for-profits or nonprof-its, whatever they liked. Courses at Yale blendedall kinds of organizations.

It turned out that within the group of students,there were quite a few that were interested inwhat, in effect, were social ventures. Of course,Ashoka was in its early years at the time, and someof us were watching it with great interest, but evenBill Drayton was not consistently using the term“social entrepreneur” to describe the folks Ashokawas supporting. They were “innovators for thepublic.” So in the course, we didn’t frame thingsaround social entrepreneurship versus businessentrepreneurship, we just talked about building anew venture regardless of your end goal. Some-times, I miss that way of framing things. I liked theopenness—starting out with what you want to ac-complish and then deciding how to best do it—notbothering so much with labels.

You mentioned that there was resistance inbusiness schools in the early days; can you tellme more about that?

After Yale, I moved to Harvard Business Schooland was teaching “Entrepreneurial Manage-ment”—a traditional business entrepreneurshipcourse. I immediately proposed a new course onsocial entrepreneurship in the 1989–1990 academicyear, but it was flatly rejected. At that time, it was

seen as too far outside of the focus of the businessschool, and I was basically told “that is not thetype of thing that we do here, we are the graduateschool of Business Administration.” I was re-minded that I was not at Yale anymore.

So, I cut a deal. If I taught my section of “Entre-preneurial Management” in the spring term (whenmy colleagues did not want to teach), I couldchange up to 25% of the cases, as long as I coveredall the same substantive topics. So I inserted someof my earliest social entrepreneurship cases—oneon Steve Mariotti and the Network for TeachingEntrepreneurship (NFTE), one on RainforestCrunch, one on Leeway (an AIDS nursing home inNew Haven). The protagonists in the latter twocases were former students of mine at Yale. Thenwhen I got promoted to associate professor, I de-veloped a new course called “Profits, Markets, andValues.” It wasn’t social entrepreneurship, but itwas dealing with innovative ways to bring valuesinto markets and [it] allowed me to develop someother new cases, such as a case on ShorebankCorporation.

Then, 4 years after my first attempt, HBS wasapproached by an alumnus, John Whitehead, witha promise of major funding for a program on not-for-profit management. Interestingly, the schooldid not immediately jump at this opportunity. Thedean would not commit without senior faculty (fullprofessors) agreeing to take the lead. Fortunately,Jim Austin and Kash Rangan stepped up. Evenmore fortunately, they invited me to be involved,and they agreed not to focus simply on “not-for-profits,” as our benefactor wanted. The new pro-gram would be called an Initiative on Social En-terprise, even though John Whitehead did not carefor that term.

Why did Mr. Whitehead not care for the term“social enterprise”?

John’s main mission was to improve managementpractices in nonprofits. He is a wise man and rec-ognized that business schools were well-positioned to do that. In fact, that idea was proba-bly an easy sell in business schools. The neatdivision of labor between business, government,and nonprofits was ingrained.

When you reframed it around social purposeventures, including for-profits, it took people out oftheir comfort zone and we needed to fight that. JimAustin and Kash Rangan were persuasive in con-vincing John that the Initiative would be more suc-cessful with students and more intellectually inter-esting if it were framed more broadly. This openedthe door for me to dust off my old course proposal.

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So with a new initiative focused on socialenterprise, I imagine that resistance to such acourse was no longer an issue?

Unfortunately, not quite. Every faculty member hada research director who had to approve their newprojects, including the development of newcourses. My research director thought it might be“career suicide” to go down this road. Fortunately,Jim, Kash, and a couple of the senior associatedeans were very supportive. They were able topersuade him otherwise, but it did take some per-suading. It was agreed that I could teach the class,but I was strongly advised to change the title to“Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector”—lead withentrepreneurship, rather than social. That re-mained the title of the course for a long time, evenafter I left. In fact, when Jim Austin (who took overthe course when I left), Jane Wei-Skillern (whotaught it later), and others developed a case bookbased on the course, the used that as the title of thebook (Wei-Skillern, Austin, Leonard, & Steven-son, 2007).

Looking back, that title change was probably goodadvice. That title represented a lot of the feeling atthe time—things were shifting to be more inclusiveof social impact in the graduate school of “BusinessAdministration,” but it was still important to leadwith entrepreneurship to make it more palatable andinteresting to both students and faculty. We wantedto attract students who would not necessarily take acourse focused on social issues, but those that weresimply intrigued by new kinds of entrepreneurialopportunities.

I think that is still true for those of us that teachsocial entrepreneurship today. We should alwayswant to serve the students that come to schoolspecifically to learn about social entrepreneur-ship, but we should also attract the set of studentsthat are more “traditional” in their goals. It is use-ful to cast a wide net. It enriches the discussion inclass and empowers more students to be informedand engage in these issues after they graduate.

The title also allowed the course to be housed inthe entrepreneurship group at HBS, which wasgood for the course and for me. I learned a greatdeal from my colleagues in that group and it putthe course in a traditional business school area,which was important for credibility.

With the course housed in the entrepreneurshipgroup, did you approach it the same as youwould for a traditional entrepreneurship course,or did you follow a different approach?

When I first developed the course, I approached itpretty much as I did my straight entrepreneurialmanagement course, with some alterations. Allventures still need to attract resources, need to beeconomically viable, and need to have sound busi-ness models and business plans. So, basically Istructured the class around the question of “howdo you launch and grow a new venture?” I wantedthe students to be thinking about it from that per-spective—from opportunity recognition, to devel-oping a business model and plan, to attractingresources (human, financial and others), to launch-ing the venture, growing and developing it overtime, assessing impact, deciding when to scale orexit, and so on.

Many of the skills needed were similar, even ifthe cases were different. However, as we discussedeach stage of the process, new and fascinatingchallenges were raised. Some of the questions thatI would—and still do—have my students grapplewith included “what does an ’attractive’ social ven-ture opportunity look like?” Unprofitable businessopportunities are usually not attractive, unless youare independently wealthy and want to subsidizeyour hobby. But what about a venture with highsocial impact potential that will require ongoingdonor support? Many now large and successfulnonprofit organizations (once new ventures) havesustained themselves on donor funds. Think of theNature Conservancy with its large membershipbase. So, what does it mean to have a viable busi-ness model? When should a social venture focuson earned income versus philanthropic support orother funding sources? How does the choice ofbusiness model and legal form affect long-termimpact and scalability? What are the alternativepaths to scaling social impact? How should socialventures measure success? When should they de-clare victory or declare failure and close up shop?

As you can see, learning how to be a socialentrepreneur can be incredibly complex since youmust be economically viable as well as sociallyimpactful. I recall one of my students saying that

How does the choice of business modeland legal form affect long-term impactand scalability? What are the alternativepaths to scaling social impact? Howshould social ventures measure success?When should they declare victory ordeclare failure and close up shop?—Dees


was part of the attraction to her—it was like play-ing a video game at a higher level of difficulty. AsSally Osberg, president of the Skoll Foundation,points out, social entrepreneurs and business en-trepreneurs remind her of Ginger Rogers and FredAstaire—Ginger had to do everything Fred coulddo, but dancing backwards and in high heels!

Was this the same course structure that you taughtwhen you moved to Stanford and then to Duke?

That was the basic design that I used for a longtime—build on a traditional business entrepre-neurship course but layer on additional tools andframeworks to address the primacy of the socialmission. My colleagues at Stanford, Dave Brady,Dan Kessler, and Shirley Heath added some newmaterial, including some social philosophy. Butbasically the structure was the same. And itworked very well—students liked it, it made senseto them, and more and more students starting com-ing to business schools to learn about these topics.

You mentioned that the course design was oneyou used “for a long time.” Has your thinkingevolved since then?

Yes, it started evolving while I was at Stanford,where I helped to build the Center for Social Inno-vation. Again, the name was very important. In-stead of social entrepreneurship, we used the term,social innovation, to cast a broader net and bringin more people who were interested in innovativeapproaches to social change. This allowed us tobuild a diverse base of support and to put socialentrepreneurship into the broader context of socialinnovation and social change. For instance, weengaged with Stanford’s Pulitzer Prize winninghistorian David Kennedy, who had written aboutsocial movements, including the career of Marga-ret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, andMacArthur Award winning English professor Shir-ley Brice Heath, who was doing fascinating workon the role of the arts in helping inner city youth.

The point that is crucial here is that social entre-preneurship should always be thought of in thelarger context of social change. It is not just aboutstarting new ventures. It is about achieving socialimpact. That is one of the major insights that havechanged the emphasis of my teaching in recentyears. I now focus more on the art of creating socialchange.

Could you say more about that? What do youmean by the “art of creating social change”?

One of the things that I believe business schoolsare weak on, and is very important in teachingsocial entrepreneurship, is understanding how youreally achieve social change in a meaningful andsustainable way and without creating unintendedconsequences. That is what I call the art of creat-ing social change.

There is just not a lot of expertise on that topic,especially within business schools—it is not afield that we have honed and is a more complexintervention that your typical student or facultymember are used to thinking about. Most of ushave been trained in business disciplines and weknow how to run organizations—how to attractcapital and build organizations. So, we tend toemphasize the things that we do well and thinkabout things with more of a consultant’s mind-set,in more of a linear way. If I do A, B will happen,then C, then D, and so on. But social change isoften not linear. It is more complex. It is more likea many player game with complex environmentalfactors, such as dynamic political and economicconditions.

So, one of the things that we need to think aboutwhen we are teaching is how do we bring in theskills that relate to effective social change and theknowledge about how that is done most effec-tively. How do you really move the needle on get-ting people out of poverty or changing a complexsystem with many intricate parts? This is aboutaction under complex uncertainty.

Fortunately, there is some good research thathas been done or is going on now that we can use.The first I’d mention is the concept of ecosystemanalysis that Paul Bloom and I have worked on. Ithelps you think about the multitude of differentplayers and the dynamics involved in workingwithin a complex and interrelated ecosystem(Bloom & Dees, 2008). There is also a line of work inthe entrepreneurship literature called “discovery-driven planning” by Ian MacMillan and RitaMcGrath that is very helpful (McGrath & Mac-Millan, 2011). There is work on strategy as a port-folio of options. More specifically in the area ofsocial change, there are interesting efforts devel-oped by economists to bring rigor to evaluating

How do you really move the needle ongetting people out of poverty or changinga complex system with many intricateparts? This is about action undercomplex uncertainty.—Dees


interventions—Innovations for Poverty Action ledby Dean Karlan and the Jamael Poverty Action Labat MIT led by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duffloare two examples. Both have published books re-cently looking at microfinance and microinsuranceand various health interventions in developingcountries and are running rigorous analytics aboutwhen these are having their intended impact andwhen they are not (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011; Karlan &Appel, 2011). This type of work is so important—weneed the same kind of knowledge and rigor aroundunderstanding social impact that we have aroundthe financial and managerial side of socialventures.

You mentioned that the “art of creating socialchange” was one major insight that has changedthe emphasis of your teaching. Have there beenother insights that you can share?

One of the most important has to do with humility,respect, and empathy—emotional intelligence. Letme tell you a personal story to illustrate my point.One of the most powerful experiences I have hadon this journey happened outside of the classroom.I took a leave of absence between Harvard andStanford and went to Appalachia to do work oneconomic development. My mother’s family has itsroots in eastern Kentucky, and so I went to workwith a community development corporation, theMountain Association for Community EconomicDevelopment, on how to develop entrepreneurshipin central Appalachia. While I was there weworked really hard and thought we came up with avery clever idea to help local entrepreneurs growtheir businesses —“Business First Stop” a compre-hensive information portal and on-line learningcommunity for local entrepreneurs. But, despite ourbest efforts, it failed in implementation due to avariety of factors. This reinforced the insight I men-tioned earlier about the complexity of effective so-cial change. It was a very humbling experience,actually one of the most eye-opening experiencesof my career. It was powerful to play somethinglike that out and to learn from the failure. It issomething that I would recommend to any aca-demic—do work in the field and get a taste for howhard it is.

I was also struck by the emotional challenges Ifaced. I was initially surprised to find some resent-ment to my even being there. I went in with anenthusiastic invitation from my host organizationand the best of intentions, but there were a lot ofpeople that reacted very negatively to my pres-ence—the idea that “here’s this guy from Harvardthat is coming to save us.” Even though I had roots

in the area, that didn’t matter. Coming from Har-vard, immediately I was different and suspect. Iquickly understood that over the years they had alot of people “parachuting” in to “help” and it wasoffensive, kind of demeaning. It took considerabletime to build trust with some people, to show thatI was listening, not pontificating and not beingcondescending or arrogant. With some, I am notsure I ever succeeded in nearly 2 years. Many peo-ple in the region have been working on povertyand development issues there for decades. Suspi-cions of outsiders can be very high. Doing thiswork well requires a high degree of emotionalintelligence.

So what does this mean for how we teach socialentrepreneurship?

I have had the good fortune of teaching at some ofthe top universities and business schools and weattract very smart, impressive, and oftentimes priv-ileged students. The students have great inten-tions and are moved to help those in poverty orwork on environmental issues or education issuesor many other topics. This is great, but it can leadto culture clashes. And business school values of-ten do not help.

One of the possible sources of conflict is that weencourage our students to be confident, assertive,analytic, action-oriented problem solvers. Thisconfident and analytic approach is great for con-sulting or pitching a business plan. But when deal-ing with a community in need, it can also look likejust the opposite of listening, empathy, and humil-ity. It can come across as a kind of cold arrogance.So we need to be careful to teach a balance—sometimes going into a CEO’s office with confi-dence and a set of analytically supported recom-mendations is optimal; other times, especially indealing with social issues, it is critical that youwork with all stakeholders, listen respectfully andactively, and be humble enough to change per-spectives based on what you are hearing. Anddon’t assume that you need to do for them whatthey can do for themselves.

That is so important and often very difficult toteach. How do you intervene socially in a way thatis respectful, that engages and helps people butthat is not demeaning, not too paternalistic,doesn’t come across as if you—in all your glory—are trying to “save them”?

In your experience, what are the best ways toteach these skills and sensitivities?


Here we need to draw on the growing literaturearound emotional intelligence. Fortunately, wehave learned that effective managers, even inmainstream business, need to be empathetic, lis-ten, and engage on that level. And I think thatuniversities, and business schools in particular,have gotten savvier about the importance of thesoft skills and how to work those into the curricu-lum. This shows up in leadership courses andworkshops, and in organizational behaviorcourses that involve teamwork exercises, to namea few examples.

We have to figure out how to integrate this in toour social entrepreneurship pedagogy, which issomething that does not come up naturally in abusiness entrepreneurship class. In addition toreadings and student role-playing exercises, thiscan be done through fieldwork with client organi-zations, as long as there are opportunities for can-did feedback from the client on these issues. It canbe done by observing community meetings or task-force meetings in a community to address issues,then debriefing the dynamics. It can be done byinterviewing different stakeholders about a partic-ular issue.

What it cannot be is just a token experience,spending a couple of hours serving meals in asoup kitchen and thinking you truly understand apoor person’s situation. The learning comes frommore authentic, engaging experiences around aproblem, with opportunities to listen and hear andget some pushback. What we are trying to teach ishow students can interact effectively across cul-tural, class, and wealth divides while maintainingtheir own identity.

It is interesting to note that Bill Drayton andAshoka have been pushing hard on their new “Em-pathy Initiative.” It is wonderful to have a concertedfocus on this in our education system, and empathyis something that all teachers should work to incor-porate. But again, we have to be careful. There is akind of empathy that I think is superficial, wherepeople are moved by someone else’s suffering to actin a way that can actually be harmful to that person.Charity can be an example of this—as MuhammadYunus talked about in his book, Banker to the Poor,we often default to charity when we think abouthelping the poor, but that rarely solves the underly-ing problem (Yunus & Jolis, 1999). So, in some cases,a superficial kind of empathy can be more destruc-tive than constructive. Empathy is only part of a totalbalance of emotional intelligence that is needed.Feeling someone else’s pain is just a start to figuringout how to respond to it in a respectful, intelligent,and constructive way.

When our students want to fight poverty, they

believe they are doing it out of empathy. But trueempathy is really about trying to understand whatis ultimately in the best interest of the person in-volved and is much more difficult to teach. How dothe “poor” you want to help define their own well-being? What do they want out of life? How do theyfeel being treated as a charity case? What can theydo for themselves that you should not be doingfor them?

This is an underdeveloped area of social entre-preneurship education. I confess that I am behindthe curve on integrating this into my own courses.

You mentioned that developing authentic, field-based experiences is a best practice, butcertainly that is not always possible in thosesituations, what else can a teacher do?

You are right—you can’t include all these things inevery course, it’s just not feasible. So when youthink about teaching social entrepreneurship, youneed to think about a balanced program wherestudents can get the full set of skills. There shouldbe courses that teach frameworks, look at casestudies, focus on analytic elements on both thebusiness and social sides, and some that haveexperiential components.

To give an example, we can look at the programthat we offer here at Fuqua. The Center for theAdvancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE),has a suite of classes that are intended to empha-size different skill-sets for students interested insocial entrepreneurship. For example, our core so-cial entrepreneurship class, taught by my col-league Cathy Clark, focuses on the key frame-works and is based around lectures and casestudies. There is no fieldwork, but there are assign-ments like “shadow a social entrepreneur,” wherethe students get to talk with a leading social en-trepreneur throughout the term and learn aboutsome of the day-to-day challenges that they faceand how they have dealt with them. We also havea course called the “Global Consulting Practicumin Social Entrepreneurship” where teams of MBAstudents work with social ventures in developingcountries—this is a true field experience wherestudents work on “real-world” problems and travelto the field to engage deeply and meaningfullywith stakeholders. And then in my class—a small,seminar style format—we focus on poverty allevi-ation and bring the experiential part in to theclassroom by having a guest each week that haslived these challenges and can talk about the com-plex ecosystems and what works and what doesn’t.Social entrepreneurship is placed in a broadercontext of social change strategies.


And of course, we are always bringing in speak-ers to expose students to a range of ideas andexamples (of things that have worked and somethat have not), getting students varying experi-ences through internships, volunteer programs,board fellowships, business plan competitions,and mentorships. Teaching social entrepreneur-ship effectively is all about developing a balancedprogram that blends theory and practice and usesdifferent teaching methods to develop the entiresuite of skills (financial, social, and soft skills) thatstudents will need to succeed.

Your examples and experience have beenfocused on business schools. Do you believe thatbusiness schools are the right place to teachsocial entrepreneurship?

Yes and no. If I have to pick one place to house thesocial entrepreneurship curriculum, I would choosethe business school because we are good at teachingthe fundamental business skills that are so impor-tant whether you have a nonprofit or a for-profit. Andwe are becoming better at teaching the soft skills.With the art of social change, we don’t have all theanswers, but we are used to dealing with complexissues in other business disciplines. For example, inour strategy and entrepreneurship courses, we areused to teaching about portfolios of options, analyz-ing intertwined market forces, and testing and evolv-ing strategies over time.

But as we talked about earlier—we don’t haveall the answers when it comes to social change. So,I think the optimal answer is that business schoolsare just part of the mix. To get the full mix, youneed to bring in people from other disciplines thatare outside of business schools that better under-stand social dynamics and social change, psycho-logical dimensions.

Some of those are in business schools, for exam-ple, organizational behavior, but we are still miss-ing other key experts.

Where do those key experts reside?

Unfortunately, in multiple places—behavioral eco-nomics, some parts of sociology, public policy, po-litical science, anthropology, and more. All ofthese can help us better understand social and

cultural change, and the whole ecosystem. So,since we are not housed in those departments, weneed to make sure we bring in those perspectivesand frameworks to help our students understandhow to create social change and change complexsystems.

Ideally, we would also incorporate the sciencesand engineering—places that develop ideas ortechnology. These ideas can be combined with ef-fective business plans and social change plansand serve to solve social problems. That shows usthe importance of interdisciplinary, collaborativeeducation that pulls together all the pieces of thesocial innovation puzzle and exposes students toall of the tools that can be used. A great example ofthis is Stanford’s Design School, with classes suchas “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordabil-ity” in which engineering and business studentsapply their skills to create product prototypes andbusiness plans to address challenges faced by thepoor. These types of interdisciplinary academicinnovations can be extremely powerful in educat-ing future social entrepreneurs and socialinnovators.

There seems to be a shift happening—from socialentrepreneurship being taught almost exclusivelyat business schools, toward many more schoolsentering the field, creating cross-campusprograms, and engaging undergraduates as wellas graduates. What are your thoughts on thattrend and any advice for programs that areoutside of the business school?

At Stanford, I had the opportunity to teach under-graduates as well as MBA students and law stu-dents. With the undergraduates, we found that itwas particularly helpful to offer a course on “Busi-ness Skills for the Social Sector,” covering verybasic concepts of marketing, operations, strategy,organization, finance, and accounting. This pro-vided a solid basis for students to dig more deeplyinto the social entrepreneurship course, and gen-erated some great discussions about when busi-ness-inspired approaches were appropriate in thesocial context. The same would be true of anyschool with students who do not have the businessbackground.

As social entrepreneurship education programsbecome more popular, are there any concernsthat we should be aware of?

In general, I think the trend of more schools andprograms engaging in social entrepreneurship ed-

Do you believe that business schools arethe right place to teach socialentrepreneurship?—Worsham


ucation is a great one. It brings more competitionand more innovative thinking to the field.

However, as in any field that becomes popular,there is always a danger of a lot of people jumpingin and not having the same level of rigor—or lack-ing consistency across programs that can appearas a lack of rigor to outsiders. There is always arisk to that, and it is something we need to becareful about if we want this field to continue todevelop and have credibility.

How do we ensure that rigor and consistencyremain?

There is one important distinction for us to keepin mind—the distinction between research uni-versities and teaching colleges and programswhere you don’t expect the faculty to be doing alot of research. We have to look to the researchuniversities to continue to provide the rigor andbuild the base of research. But then we have tomake sure that the high-quality research istranslated into effective, credible teaching mate-rials that can be used by everyone. Fortunately,we have some people in this field who are will-ing to do that.

Many other schools will contribute by develop-ing the pedagogy and experimenting with differ-ent teaching styles. The research universities canlearn from creative teaching programs on this di-mension. The two have to work together, commu-nicate and coordinate, so that the knowledge basecontinues to be built in a rigorous way, and thenthat knowledge base is reflected in new, effectiveteaching techniques.

How do you measure whether your teaching ishaving an impact? Do you anticipate that yourstudents will go on to found organizations andyour success will be measured by the number ofnew social ventures or are there other metrics toconsider?

I don’t think our job is to produce students whoimmediately launch social ventures upon gradua-tion. That may happen, but if it does, it will be theexception.

It turns out that few students launch any kindof new venture right after graduation, and forgood reason. Many of them are not well-positioned to do so. Even if they have an intrigu-ing idea, the timing may not be right, theymay not have the experience or skills to lead theventure, or they may have trouble attracting thenecessary resources. And many MBAs and othergraduates are better suited to different roles,

[such as] helping social entrepreneurs buildtheir ventures into something with greater im-pact. Preparing students to do this is just asimportant as preparing them to be the lead so-cial entrepreneur. It takes a team to achieve so-cial impact. Interestingly, when you look at greatentrepreneurs, such as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates,many did not come out of MBA programs. Somedid not stay to finish college. The profiles ofleading social entrepreneurs are likely to be sim-ilar, probably a few will be MBAs, but most willhave MBAs on their teams who will play impor-tant roles in building something sustainable andscalable.

So I think the right measures are more aboutequipping our students with the tools to be effec-tive in any entrepreneurial social problem-solving activity they might engage in—whetherit is through a corporate employer, at a consult-ing firm, working with a social entrepreneur,serving on a board, providing volunteer consult-ing, or the like.

What do you see as the future of the field ofsocial entrepreneurship and how will that impactteaching pedagogy?

I hope it will become part of an overall growinginterdisciplinary, interschool curriculum on find-ing innovative, effective solutions to social andenvironmental problems. As change becomesmore rapid and uncertainty more of a norm, so-cial problems will continue to evolve and shift. Inthe face of this, our societies need to be flexibleand adaptive. Social entrepreneurs have a keyrole to play in creating that adaptability. Theycan serve as a learning laboratory for society asthey try out innovative solutions. We just need toprovide the right environment to encourage de-centralized social problem solving, to harvest theknowledge from this activity, and to put thatknowledge to work in a timely fashion. This iswhat I am currently writing about in mynew book.

In terms of pedagogy, I would hope we get moresophisticated about equipping social entrepre-neurs with effective social change strategies andwith the kind of emotional intelligence (and under-lying values) that they need to be effective.

CONCLUSION

It is truly impressive to reflect on how far thefield has come in the past two decades—fromfighting just to be included in the curriculum at atop-tier university to a stage where many univer-


sities and institutions are embracing social en-trepreneurship, developing minors and majors,and launching student programs across multipledisciplines. In addition, research in social entre-preneurship has been building in quantity andquality from occasional case studies to frame-works and rigorous academic inquiry into busi-ness models, scaling, evaluation methods, andmuch more.

As the field continues to grow, Dees’s reflectionson how—and where—social entrepreneurshipshould be taught are important to consider. Coor-dinating social entrepreneurship programs withcommercial entrepreneurship programs to lever-age resources, faculty interests, and capture a“wide net” of students is important but notenough. Most scholars agree that we must rec-ognize the distinctions between mainstreamcommercial entrepreneurship and the uniquechallenges of social entrepreneurship, and ac-count for those distinctions in our teaching ped-agogy—not only in terms of incorporating les-sons on the primacy of a social venture’s missionand the “nuts and bolts” of business modelchoices and legal forms, but also in terms of theintangible skills that students must learn to ex-cel in social entrepreneurship.

For example, Dees referred to the “art of socialchange” and the complexity and uncertainty in-herent in the ecosystems in which social entre-preneurs work. Of course, this is also true in thecommercial entrepreneurship space, but it be-comes even more complex in a world of marketfailures, measurement difficulties, and a focusnot just on starting new ventures, but on creatingand achieving sustainable and scalable socialimpact.

In order to best prepare students to tacklethese complex issues in an authentic and emo-tionally intelligent way, Dees argues for innova-tion in teaching pedagogy and a focus on cross-disciplinary teaching and research. However, thechallenges associated with creating this trulyinterdisciplinary approach (ranging from ideaand technology generation in sciences and engi-neering, business fundamentals in businessschools, public policy, and political science, law,anthropology, and many more) will require cre-ative thinking and flexibility on the part of uni-versities and institutions. Institutional barriersexist in many schools, and incentives are notalways in place to work across these barriers.There could also be risks of stretching across toomany disciplines—will that make things too dif-fuse as we try to build consistency and rigor inan emerging field?

Fortunately, some of this innovation has alreadybegun and is leading us toward the future of socialentrepreneurship education—a future of cross-disciplinary programming and research, engagingstudents in the learning process and tailoring thelearning objectives to the student’s stage (under-graduate, graduate, business, etc.), building on en-trepreneurship education, but also addressing thedistinctions inherent in social entrepreneurship,and helping students to develop empathy, emo-tional intelligence, and a true understanding ofboth content and context when solving socialproblems.

As Peter Drucker has said, “The entrepreneur-ial mystique? It’s not magic, it’s not mysterious,and it has nothing to do with the genes. It’s adiscipline. And, like any discipline, it can belearned” (Kuratko, 2009: xxix). The same could besaid for social entrepreneurship. So, if we buildon the progress that has already occurred insocial entrepreneurship education and continueto develop rigorous, innovative methods ofteaching, we will be able to prepare new gener-ations of social innovators to solve some of theworld’s greatest social issues.

REFERENCES

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Kuratko, D. 2009. Entrepreneurship: Theory, process, and prac-tice. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.

McGrath, R., & MacMillan, I. 2011. Discovery-driven growth: Abreakthrough process to reduce risk and seize opportunity.Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Murray, S. November 1, 2009. MBAs turn to social enterprise. TheFinancial Times. Retrieved from http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ec284fae-c704-11de-bb6f-00144feab49a.html.

Net Impact. 2012. Retrieved from http://netimpact.org/about-net-impact.

Stevenson, H. February 17, 2000. Why entrepreneurship has won!2000 Coleman Foundation White Paper. Available at www.unm.edu/~asalazar/Kauffman/Entrep_research/e_won.pdf.

Tracey, P., & Phillips, N. 2007. The distinctive challenge of edu-cating social entrepreneurs: A postscript and rejoinder tothe special issue on entrepreneurship education. Academyof Management Learning and Education, 6: 264–271.

Tyson, L. May 3, 2004. Good works—With a business plan.Bloomberg Business Week. Available at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_18/b3881047_mz007.htm.

Wei-Skillern, J., Austin, J., Leonard, H., & Stevenson, H. 2007.Entrepreneurship in the social sector. Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage Publications.

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J. Gregory Dees

Erin L. Worsham is the managingdirector of the Center for the Ad-vancement of Social Entrepre-neurship (CASE) at Duke Univer-sity’s Fuqua School of Business.Prior to joining CASE, Mrs. Wor-sham had experience in the non-profit, public, and private sectors,including work at Booz AllenHamilton, the U.S. Agency for In-ternational Development, the

World Bank, and a public policy think tank in Washington, DC.Mrs. Worsham earned her BA from Duke University and herMBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.


Documents

Reflections and Insights on Teaching Social Entrepreneurship: An