Social entrepreneurship Fundamentals

Enroll in social entrepreneurship fundamentals to show everyone—from students to professionals—how processes and systems enable social welfare through building a social enterprise, with toolkits, case studies, and mentorship.

Explore social entrepreneurship by pursuing a social mission with sustainable, self-financed model and four blocks: mission primacy, scalable innovation, self-sustaining business model, and impact on people, planet, and profit.

Define social innovation as a process of developing and deploying new products, processes, or services to solve complex social problems with long-term impact. Differentiate social innovation from commercial innovation.

Identify the two broad forms of social enterprises, for-profit and nonprofit, and examine NGOs, social businesses, private for-profit social enterprises, and cooperatives, all pursuing social welfare with embedded social mission.

Identify how the extent of social problems, government failure, and market failure drive the emergence of social enterprises, the third economy, that merge social and financial value.

Discover the three critical elements—passion, a problem, and a process—that starting a social enterprise hinges on, and learn how inspiration fuels your venture.

start with your passion, the driving force behind social enterprise, as Muhammad Yunus and Charity Water show how deep commitment translates into real social change.

Identify a societal problem by observing needs in your community. Use human-centered design and design thinking to analyze it, as shown by Grameen Bank's microfinance and Selkoe's solar energy.

Develop a strong process flow by choosing the right social enterprise structure and business model, then secure finance and resources through country-specific systems to drive societal change.

Fund your social enterprise by starting with personal funds or loans, proving revenue with an MVP, and securing support from incubators, angel investors, venture capitalists, and impact funds.

Identify the dual mission of social enterprises and articulate a revenue-generating business model. Build a proper business strategy, scale up the venture, and secure funding to sustain the venture.

Discover how human centered design and design thinking help you understand problems and develop a value proposition for social impact.

Apply human centered design to understand customer pain points and use discover, analyze, create, and test phases to craft data-driven solutions that build trust.

Explore design thinking, a human-centered, nonlinear five-stage approach to solving unknown problems by empathizing with users, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, and testing to create innovative solutions.

Explore the social enterprise business model canvas, a practical tool derived from the business model canvas to map problem areas, resources, impact, and revenue for deconstructing a social venture.

The social enterprise business model canvas starts from the social problem and maps core value offerings, service portfolio, network partners, beneficiaries, channels, revenue streams, costs, and impact metrics.

Explore the Thank You social enterprise through its business model canvas, showing donation of all profits to poverty reduction and a broad product portfolio with global partnerships.

Understand the concept of impact as the net effect your organization creates over time and how it is measured.

Explore the concept of social impact, its measurement through tools, and the social footprint within sustainability and the triple bottom line framework.

Measure social impact to boost accountability and demonstrate results to stakeholders. Track progress with metrics, communicate value, and build collaboration to keep the organization on track.

Explore sustainability through its three pillars—people, planet, and profits—balancing present needs with future generations' ability to meet them. See how social, environmental, and economic factors integrate for sustainable change.

Trace the shift from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals, detailing the 17 SDGs and how social innovators use them to identify priorities and spark solutions.

Discover how social entrepreneurship builds on giants, exploring case studies and conversations with leading social entrepreneurs to learn strategies for tackling big challenges.

Analyze Grameen Bank's microcredit model and Muhammad Yunus's social entrepreneurship to reduce poverty, empower village women, and scale a lending approach across 58 countries.

Discover how BRAC, one of the world's largest NGOs, advances development across 11 countries. It delivers IT services, microfinance, education, rural health, disaster relief, and vocational training.

Becoming a social entrepreneur is a lifetime pursuit; nurture your seed through adversities, grow it into a tree, and use knowledge, skill, and passion to create lasting social change.