Prof Saul Estrin NAB 4.24

Economic approaches - Saul Estrin

Quantitative Methods - Yally Avrahampour

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This course is not available as an outside option.

The course is a rigorous examination of key insights, concepts and theoretical frameworks that are essential in understanding social innovation and enterprises. Students learn to understand, synthesise and relate these insights, concepts and theoretical frameworks to real-life empirical phenomena and problems through interactive lectures, facebook discussions, cases, empirical studies, videos, but most importantly building to individual design or consulting projects on actual management problems for social innovation and enterprise in the capstone/dissertation course.

More specifically, students learn:

• Key theoretical approaches (economic and quantitative methods which comprise accounting and quantitative statistics) to understanding social innovations and entrepreneurship;
• Empirical findings - typically from recent management research and related fields (this is a young field) on how management aspects of social innovations and enterprises are associated with social impact;
• A rigorous synthesis of the most important economic, accounting and quantitative/statistical insights, concepts, theoretical approaches required to set-up, manage, and scale up social innovation and enterprises;
• Relating theoretical and methodological insights, concepts and frameworks for social innovation and enterprise to real world phenomena and social problems, leading to an individual design or consulting capstone project in the dissertation course.

30 hours of lectures in the LT.

Five weeks will focus on core insights from economics applied to social enterprises (such as scale) and the other five weeks will focus on quantitative methods (accounting and quantitative statistics) to address issues related to the double bottom line (abbreviated as DBL or 2BL) which seeks to extend the conventional bottom line, that measures social enterprise performance with respect to social impact.

An introductory session will take place prior to the commencement of the quantitative methods portion of the course.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the LT.

The formative essay is a voluntary 'pre-run' of a summative essay, where the academic insights of the course are combined and synthesised with new insights sourced from academic literature by the student. Students receive feedback on their formative essay in the same way they get feedback on the summative essay.

J. Adam Cobb, Tyler Wry, and Eric Yanfei Zhao, Funding Financial Inclusion: Institutional Logics and the Contextual Contingency of Funding for Microfinance Organizations, ACAD MANAGE J amj.2015.0715.

Emerson J 2003, 'The blended value proposition: Integrating social and financial returns', California Management Review, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 35-51.

Husted BW and de Jesus Salazar, J 2006, 'Taking Friedman seriously: Maximizing profits and social performance', Journal of Management Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 75-91.

Mark R. Kramer, "Measuring Innovation: Evaluation in the Field of Social Entrepreneurship," April 2005, http://community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloads/report-kramer.pdf

Essay (90%, 3000 words) and class participation (10%) in the LT.