Dr Niranjan Janardhanan and Prof Naufel Vilcassim

Prof Vilcassim - Marketing

Dr Janardhanan - Organisational Behaviour

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 from the perspectives of Marketing and Organisational Behaviour (OB). Students learn to understand, synthesise and relate these insights, concepts and theoretical frameworks to real-life phenomena and problems through interactive lectures, cases, empirical studies and videos. In a very practical sense, students will test this knowledge in a group marketing project as well as will apply it to effecting social change in relation to such topics as motivation, team management, and organizational culture, in the OB portion of the course.

More specifically, students learn:

• Key theoretical approaches (through the lenses of organisational behaviour and marketing) to understanding social innovations and entrepreneurship;

• Empirical findings - typically from recent management research and related fields; this is a young field - on how Marketing and OB aspects of social innovations and enterprises are associated with social impact;

• A rigorous synthesis of the most important marketing and organisational behaviour insights, concepts, theoretical approaches 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, through a group project (in Marketing), as well as through applied case-related individual essays (in OB);

• Also importantly this course provides essential knowledge for the individual design or consulting projects on actual management problems for social innovation and enterprise in the capstone/dissertation course.

This course comprises a Marketing and Organisational Behaviour stream.

A: Organisational Behaviour

• Personality and Individual Differences

• Motivation and Rewards

• Organisational Culture, Ideological Currency & Making a difference

• Well-being at Work

• Leadership and Self-Initiative

B: Marketing

• Application of marketing concepts to social enterprises

• Evaluating stakeholder exchanges

• Attitudes, beliefs & values; models of buyer behaviour

• Segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy for ventures

• Developing a product & promotion strategy

30 hours of lectures and 3 hours of workshops in the MT.

Five weeks (15hrs) will focus on Marketing and five weeks (15hrs) will focus on core insights from Organisational Behaviour, with the aim of imparting key managerial knowledge and skills required to catalyse the changes required to launch and lead successful entrepreneurial ventures in social innovation.

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

The topic of the formative essay will be based on the Marketing section of the course.

For Marketing:

• Karnani, A., (2007). The Mirage of Marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid: How the Private Sector Can Help Alleviate Poverty. California Management Review 49 (4), 90-111.
• Madeline Powell, Stephen P. Osborne, "Can marketing contribute to sustainable social enterprise?", Social Enterprise Journal, (2015) Vol. 11 Iss: 1, pp. 24-46.
• Choi, N. and Majumdar, S. (2014) Social entrepreneurship as an essentially contested concept: Opening a new avenue for systematic future research. Journal of Business Venturing (29), 363–376

For Organisational Behaviour:

• Bargsted, M., Picon, M., Salazar, A., & Rojas, Y. (2013). Psychosocial characterization of social entrepreneurs: A comparative study. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 4(3),331–346.

• Davis, G. & White, C. (2015). How your company can change the world. Harvard Business Review (5), 48-55.
• Fauchart, E., & Gruber, M. (2011). Darwinians, communitarians, and missionaries: The role of founder identity in entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Journal, 54(5), 935-957.

Project (45%, 2500 words) and class participation (10%) in the MT.
Essay (45%, 2000 words) in the LT.