Prof Stephan Chambers The Marshall Institute, 5 Lincoln's Inn Fields

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

     This course crystallises the academic learnings from across the degree programme into an applied experience.  It runs concurrently with course delivery across all modules.  Students will work in groups of four or five, supported by faculty, to develop an entrepreneurial business proposal for social impact, moving through idea generation, initial design and formal proposal.  The proposal may be a new organisation or an activity within an existing organisation with explicit social benefit. 

     The project creates a space for real world application of students’ learning; development of the project concurrently with programme delivery enables substantive interaction between project work and core skills learning.  The course mirrors the development of the programme overall by requiring students to address questions of context (and relation to state and private actors), questions of strategy and market development, financing, and reporting as well as personal leadership, communications and persuasion.  Projects are designed in the expectation of potential real world implementation.

     Working in a group is an essential component of this course.  Students will be expected to reflect on how their groups form, how they establish principles for working effectively, and how they resolve conflict or disagreement.  They will be asked to reflect on their own group dynamic and how it might be a function of culture, mission, and measurement.  Students will be asked explicitly to reflect in their essays on the process of selecting a topic and assigning roles. Since so much of their professional life will involve impromptu and non-elective group working we consider this aspect of the course particularly important.

Teaching will take place over the duration of the programme.  There will be whole cohort teaching sessions of three hours each module, plus tutorial meetings for each project group.

Formative work, through presentations and discussions in tutorial meetings, will be continual for the duration of the programme.  Students will be asked to submit a draft outline of their final summative essay.

Essay (50%), presentation (35%) and proposal (15%).

Assessment will be through a group presentation (35%), group composition of a business model canvas (15%), and an extended essay of 5,000 words at the end of the project (50%).