Courses

OSUN Themes: Global Justice; Inequalities; Sustainability and Climate

Social Entrepreneurship

Term: September 2, 2024 – December 18, 2024
Level: 100-Level
Day/Time: Monday; Wednesday 10:00 - 11:20 AM EDT
Instructor: Eban Goodstein, Bard College
This is a collaborative, global course in social entrepreneurship, where student teams ideate and develop models for social enterprises. Bard students will engage with classes from Palestine, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh, Columbia, Taiwan and other countries, through a mixture of synchronous online learning, and in-person labs. Social entrepreneurship is the process of building new organizations that offer scalable solutions to social and environmental challenges. Social enterprise can be either for-profit, or non-profit, but key is the ambition to address societal problems at scale. The practice of social entrepreneurship explores the full suite of liberal learning: critical analysis, persuasive writing, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, design thinking, and group social dynamics. The course will culminate in a “shark tank for sustainability” among and between teams from the different universities, with winning teams then competing at the Bard MBA’s annual Disrupt to Sustain pitch competition in December. The teaching and learning collaboration will be made possible through the use of Bard MBA Professor Crawford’s cloud-based teaching tool, RebelBase, which supports project-based learning embedded in a collaborative, online entrepreneurial ecosystem. The course will include readings and discussion focused on social issues related to entrepreneurship: drivers of change, from decarbonization to AI; delinking growth from material throughput; urban-based innovation ecosystems; social obstacles to risk taking; working on multi-disciplinary teams; language, power, race and gender dynamics in entrepreneurship; deconstructing the archetypes of entrepreneurship.
Credits: 4 US /  8 ECTS