The economics of social entrepreneurship

Abstract

The emerging field of social entrepreneurship seeks to address social challenges in environments where traditional public sector institutions are weak or absent. With its explicit focus on solving problems, social entrepreneurship is inherently interdisciplinary. A well-designed undergraduate course in social entrepreneurship can enhance traditional economics course offerings by integrating frameworks and pedagogies from both public policy and human-centered design.

Keywords:

• Human centered design
• public policy

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Peter Robbie for the inspiration for the course, to Thanh Nguyen and Connor Watumull for help with its original design, to Sophie Wang and Curt Welling for many thoughtful discussions of its content, and to the eight cohorts of students who have taken the course to date and shared their feedback. The author thanks Wendy Stock for organizing the panel session on “Teaching Innovative Courses in Economics” at the 2021 Allied Social Sciences Association annual meeting and for the invitation to participate. The author further thanks Sam Allgood and KimMarie McGoldrick (editors) for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1 These trends were articulated by my colleague Curt Welling, the former president and CEO of AmeriCares and now a clinical professor of business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

2 While the course definition encompasses both environmental concerns and poverty, the subject matter focuses on poverty, including its many ramifications for health, housing, education, and transportation. This narrowing of topics accommodates the limits on developing subject matter expertise in a one-term course and nudges the business model projects toward solutions based less on technological fixes and more on changing the behavior of producers and consumers.

3 https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/undergraduate/ab/minors/human-centered-design

4 For those instructors who prefer a textbook, Kickul and Lyons (2020) is a comprehensive reference for students and a good place to start. The Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) is considered the field’s journal. The course syllabus has 7 articles from the SSIR, mostly on frameworks for thinking about social entrepreneurship. The latest syllabus from the course is available at https://sites.dartmouth.edu/asamwick/teaching.

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act

6 The sociologists’ research methodology of the authors embedding themselves in low-income communities is also used to good effect by Desmond (2016) on the problem of eviction and Servon (2017) on problems in financial services.

7 https://www.startupexperience.com/

8 https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas

9 Blank (2013) provides an excellent introduction to and overview of the methodology, and there are many applications to the social sector elsewhere in the literature.

10 See https://www.giveessential.org/ and https://votesaver.org/, respectively.