Social Entrepreneurship

Applying entrepreneurial methods to social problems — building ventures whose primary aim is social impact. It is the conceptual load-bearing idea behind Your Passion, Your Solution (YPYS), the 2014 not-for-profit business plan in Kyle’s corpus: YPYS is “essentially a platform for teaching and practicing” social innovation and social entrepreneurship simultaneously, running a year-long experiential program plus a HUB/Venture incubator that helps college and high-school students develop their own social ventures. YPYS deliberately distinguishes itself from pure entrepreneurship programs (e.g. YEA!) by focusing specifically on social ventures.

The MBA Degrees notes surface the pedagogical debate around it. A first-cohort Haas/REDF student (the Jed Emerson program that became a template for the field) argues social entrepreneurship is “a culture permeating the whole program, not a course track.” Greg Dees of Duke CASE offers the limiting principle: “We’re not teaching them to have the personal characteristics required to be a successful social entrepreneur any more than a music teacher teaches the personal characteristics to be a gifted musician” — but good teachers can “coax, encourage, inspire, reward, and model,” exposing students to people like themselves who have started social ventures. Figures like Muhammad Yunus and Wendy Kopp appear as the field’s exemplars and “counter-current” to conventional MBA training.

Context: Social entrepreneurship is the practice of pursuing innovative solutions to social problems using business principles, popularized by figures like Muhammad Yunus (Grameen Bank), Wendy Kopp (Teach For America), and academic centers such as Duke’s CASE and the Skoll Foundation.

Where this appears

• Your Passion, Your Solution (YPYS) — the load-bearing idea of Kyle’s 2014 nonprofit business plan; a platform to teach and practice it via experiential learning + an incubator
• MBA Degrees — the teaching debate (Haas/REDF, Greg Dees, Jed Emerson) over whether it can be taught and whether it is a culture or a track