Social Entrepreneurship: An Emerging Field in Higher Education
Friday, September 19
Greg Dees, Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, Duke University
(Co-sponsored by the Center for Experiential Learning (CEL) and the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA))
Greg Dees, one of the leading voices in the emerging area of social entrepreneurship, offers this partial definition: "when people with business-like [entrepreneurial] methods come together with innovative solutions to social problems." Like business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs are able to create new opportunities: an entrepreneur "always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it," finding inspiration, for example, in "shifting demographics, updated technologies, or new social attitudes."
Dees will discuss the history of social entrepreneurship on college and university campuses, and its role in preparing students to develop their own innovative solutions to complex social problems. He will also address the growing need for new theoretical frameworks/models to strengthen the practice of social entrepreneurship, and will explore the opportunities and challenges colleges face in building strong interdisciplinary communities of practice and knowledge.
Greg Dees holds a Masters degree in Public and Private Management from Yale, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins. He has taught at the Yale School of Management and at the Harvard Business School. In 1995, Greg received the Harvard Business School's Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. In 1996, Dees took a two-year leave to work on economic development in central Appalachia at the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development in Berea, Kentucky. He was the Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service and co-director of the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University from 1998-2001. He joined the faculty of Duke University in 2001.
Please join us for what promises to be a lively discussion.
For additional information, see "Developing the Field of Social Entrepreneurship," a report from the Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship,. (Note, in particular, the executive summary, pages v-vi.)
