Social Innovation

Defines social innovation as a process of developing and deploying products, processes, or services that solve complex social problems and yield long-term social impact, while distinguishing it from commercial innovation.

Identify three drivers of social innovation: growth of social inequality, lack of adequate government support, and market failure.

Identify the three key dimensions of social innovation: introducing new products, services, or processes; addressing a social problem; and measurable impact, to improve lives and environments.

Trace the origins of the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals from the Earth Summit and Millennium Summit, and learn how targets and indicators guide social innovators.

Explore various types of social innovation, including product, service, and process innovations, and examine practical examples that illustrate these concepts.

Explore the broad types of social innovation, focusing on incremental, radical, and disruptive innovations with examples like television evolution, iPhone, digital cameras, Netflix, and streaming services.

Explore social innovation across three dimensions, social product, service, and process innovations, through tangible examples like the zero electricity cooler in Bangladesh and solar solutions from Selco in India.

Explore social service innovation through microfinance and floating hospitals, as Grameen Bank and Emirates Friendship Hospital illustrate how innovative services improve lives in rural Bangladesh.

Explore social process innovations that renew existing societal processes to improve lives and drive social change for refugees, homeless, and those lacking education, as shown by Mercy Foundation in Australia.

Explore social entrepreneurship and its four foundational blocks: prioritize social mission over financial gain, innovate scalable solutions, ensure a self-sustaining business model, and measure impact via people, planet, and profit.

the lecture explains two broad social enterprise types—for-profit and nonprofit—showing how policy, history, and social dynamics shape diverse NGOs, social businesses, private for-profit ventures, and cooperatives.

Learn how to start in social entrepreneurship by combining human centered design and design thinking to understand a problem and craft a compelling value proposition for social impact.

Explore human centered design as a customer-focused approach that fosters empathy and loyalty while delivering data-driven solutions, guiding teams through discover, analyze, create, and test.

Design thinking is a nonlinear, iterative process with five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, rooted in human centered design to solve ill fated or unknown problems.

Design thinking brings a humane, user-centered approach to social innovation, involving end users as key stakeholders to solve real societal problems rather than merely creating products.

Explore the social enterprise business model canvas to conceptualize and implement a venture. Identify problem, resources, areas of impact, and revenue sources, then apply a practical deconstruction example.

Learn how the social enterprise business model canvas distills social innovation ideas into a clear, visual framework of the key building blocks, enabling concise, impactful communication.

Learn how the social enterprise business model canvas provides a visual summary of a social business idea, underpinning its parts with bullet points to illustrate complex social innovation clearly.

Identify social problems to define the core value offerings and the mission. Explore the service portfolio, network partners, beneficiaries, channels, revenue streams, costs, and impact metrics.

Deconstruct the Thank You social enterprise using the business model canvas to show a mission of poverty reduction and donating 100 percent of profits.

Explore the concept of impact for social entrepreneurs, defining the net effect of your organization over a set time frame and how to measure it.

Explore social impact and sustainability, unpack the social footprint, and examine the triple bottom line and measurement tools to assess how social enterprises create real value.

Measure social impact to boost accountability, track progress, communicate value, foster collaboration, and keep social organizations on track toward meaningful change.

Define sustainability as meeting present needs without compromising future generations. Identify its three pillars: people, planet, and profits, and explain how social, environmental, and economic aims intertwine.

The triple bottom line frames sustainability through economic, social, and environmental value, measured via frameworks like GRI reporting and B Corp certification.

Explore how standing on the shoulders of giants informs social innovation by examining leading social entrepreneurs and case studies, gaining perspectives, skills, and lessons from their journeys.

Explore Grameen Bank's microcredit model led by Muhammad Yunus, revealing collateral-free loans to poor village women, its global replication, social impact, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Delivers education, health, microfinance, disaster relief, and vocational training to over 135 million people in 11 countries, making Brac one of the world's largest social enterprises based in Bangladesh.