The course is centered around projects in which groups of students develop, pitch, and build an innovative, startup social venture. Students will conduct research and implement a plan for its creation and growth and pitch the venture to faculty, investors, social entrepreneurs, domain experts, foundation officers, and philanthropists. Embedded in the class is the John Edwardson ’72 Social New Venture Challenge.
The definition that we will use to determine if an idea belongs in the course is that social organizations are designed, managed and governed to deliver on a social mission as a fundamental objective and seek funding from sources who are driven to invest in part by the social mission, i.e., impact investors, foundations, philanthropists, public entities. Compared to traditional for-profit organizations, such organizations rely in varying degrees on different governance mechanisms, different ways to measure performance, different marketing, and different growth plans. These organizations may be structured as for-profit, nonprofit with a sustainable business model, or nonprofit that relies on philanthropy long-term. Because of these differences in management and the institutional structure supporting them, a distinct curriculum is appropriate, even if the definition excludes many organizations that create substantial social value.
The class will include multiple rounds of pitch presentations with detailed feedback.
The most promising ventures will be invited to participate in the Social Venture Accelerator (SVA) course --34735 -- in the Spring Quarter. SVA ventures will pitch before a judging panel of investors and philanthropists for at least $400,000 in investments or grants.
Enrollment is by permission of the instructor based on an application.
The three broad objectives for student teams are: (1) make progress on building your social venture. This will include some subset of building a prototype, developing or implementing a pilot, building relationships with partners, advisors, and potential investors and philanthropists; (2) refine your venture model. This will include engaging in customer discovery and other research, building, refining, and validating your business model; building a financial model; articulating a theory of change and impact measurement strategy; and (3) delivering an effective pitch. This will include a great deal of practice delivering the pitch and answering questions, revising and improving your pitch deck, coaching, and incorporating feedback from judges and experts.
Most of the class sessions consist of teams working on and delivering pitch presentations to outside judges and/or internal coaches/faculty. Class sessions in the other weeks will consist of discussions and classroom exercises that focus on key aspects of building a social venture and developing a feasible and compelling venture model and pitch. We will spend some time discussing key differences between the theory and practice of social entrepreneurship and traditional entrepreneurship.
