Producing Social Entrepreneurs Through Education

As more and more academic programs on social entrepreneurship are being introduced in schools, it's about time to consider some future implications.

The curriculum focus can be in any of these 3 interlinked tracks: research, enterprise and cross-acedemic disciplines to fill talent gaps. The last track was recently highlighted in Dowser's interview on NYU's program in social entrepreneurship, stressing that the curriculum should be interlinked with other academic disciplines in order to develop diverse talents to help building the infrastructure for the field. It's important to consider all 3 tracks beyond the currently popular and enterprise-driven MBA programs on social entrepreneurship.

The biggest misconception that we'll need to avoid is that we have to go to schools to become social entrepreneurs/ social change agents. Or even worse, you need to attend top academic institutions to excel in the field. In recent NYTimes discussion, Nick Temple warned about restricting the field to university students and making it a career track. I'm in the consensus that we should never paint an exclusive image over it, and I don't think we should begin competitive labeling of Harvard/ Stanford social entrepreneurs, etc (to a lesser degree, we do already).

While they may be better equiped with expertise and resources but unless there's better evidence and maturity in assessing academic programs on social entrepreneurship, I find it misleading to imply which schools produce 'better' social entrepreneurs and claim credits for their achievement. We should avoid narrow comparison, it's obvious to say there are social change agents who don't study social entrepreneurship, there are also entrepreneurs who live intimately in poor communities and create social transformation that they care less to fathom intellectually. There's also another approach (adopted by Educate!) that believes social change agents should be created from within poor communities. Established academic institution is just one of those avenues to produce these social change agents.