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 by application to cases relating to different types of social enterprises in Marketing,   as well as by applying   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  applied case-related individual analysis in both Marketing and OB.;
• Also importantly this course provides essential knowledge and tools  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
• Identity of entrepreneurs and the enterprise
• Leadership and decision-making

B: Marketing

The specific objectives of this part of the course  include the following tasks.

1. Analysing critically the task of marketing under contemporary conditions and examining the major functions that comprise the marketing task
2. Developing an awareness of the major types of marketing problems faced by social enterprises with the emphasis on sound analytical approaches (both qualitative and quantitative) to effective decision-making
3. Evaluating various types of strategies and tactics that can be employed in guiding the marketing activities of a SE by becoming familiar with different theories, concepts, frameworks, models, and methods that can be brought to bear in developing and executing marketing strategies and
4. Measuring the effectiveness of a firm’s marketing strategy and tactics using appropriate metrics, given its objectives

Regardless of your functional position, by the end of the course you should feel comfortable in applying key marketing concepts in practice and evaluating the marketing activities of your organization.

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

Five weeks (15hrs) will focus on OB and  in the second  five weeks (15hrs) will focus on core insights from Marketing, 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 AT.

Students will be expected to:

1. produce 1 essay in the AT. This (optional) formative will be based on the OB section of the course, where students will be asked to submit a small essay-type section (~500 words) to reflect the format and the topic of their respective summative topics.
2. provide written answers (maximum 1000 words) to any one of the cases assigned for class discussion in Marketing. As the respective cases will be discussed in the class sessions for which they have been assigned,  the individual write-ups must be submitted at the beginning of the class session.

For Marketing:

• Madeline Powell, Stephen P. Osborne, "Can marketing contribute to sustainable social enterprise?", Social Enterprise Journal, (2015) Vol. 11 Iss: 1, pp. 24-46.
• A Framework for Marketing Strategy Formation for Social Enterprises (Craig-Morse and Vilcassim, private note)
• Read: Digital Marketing and Communication for Social Enterprises
  
  (Bandyopadhyay and Ray: Chapter 18 - Media Trust in a Digital World pp 251-262) Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

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.

Essay (45%, 2000 words) and take-home assessment (45%) in the WT.
Class participation (10%) in the AT.

OB: Essay (45%, 2000 words) in the WT.

MKT: Take-home assignment  (45%, 2500 words) in the WT