Archive for the ‘Research and Methodology’ Category
Social Enterprise Education: What it covers and what’s missing
Social Enterprise education is an area of growing academic interest. Several universities already offer courses on the subject. Villgro Innovations Foundation has also been at the forefront of social enterprise education in India, having jointly designed and delivered a minor course “Innovation and Social Enterprise,” at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. But is social enterprise education covering all that is necessary, and how suited are courses offered in Western universities for the Indian context? Devyani Srinivasan, an indepdent consultant, explores.
In their article “Social Entrepreneurship Education: Is It Achieving the Desired Aims?,” it is surprising that authors Brock and Steiner do not begin with a discussion of what the desired aims of social entrepreneurship education are. This question is only addressed in the last paragraph of their paper, and that too, implicitly. The last paragraph says:
“…The ultimate question is what course content and designs are most apt to persuade students to develop a social mindset and become service-oriented leaders of tomorrow. The real test of our work is the choices and actions of our graduates. How many will choose a career path working for a socially entrepreneurial enterprise or starting their own social venture within one year, five years, ten years, and twenty years after graduation?”
To have students work for or start their own social enterprise are certainly two important aims of social entrepreneurship education, and were part of the list of aims that my colleague and I drew up when planning a minor in innovation and social entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M). In preparation for the course, we drew up a list of desired outcomes. These goals mentioned above correspond to numbers five and seven respectively on our list. However, I reproduce the entire list below in order to illustrate that there can be many other aims of social entrepreneurship education, that Brock and Steiner neglect to discuss.
- To enable participants to understand what social enterprise is an analyze different models of social enterprises
- To develop participants’ primary research and writing skills, through creating case studies of social enterprises
- To develop a body of case studies on social enterprises in India that can be used in subsequent years, through the participants’ assignments
- To enable students to experience the worlds of an innovator and social entrepreneur, through creating their own product or service and business plan
- To create champions of innovation and social enterprise amongst participants
- To create a pipeline of innovative products with the potential to create social impact, that students can further develop through Genesis (IIT Madras’ Social Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition), L-RAMP (the Lemelson Recognition and Mentoring Programme) or other avenues.
- To contribute to building a body of talent for the social enterprise sector
However, Brock and Steiner’s paper is methodologically very strong. They analyze 107 social entrepreneurship syllabi in the U.S. and abroad, the greatest number of courses analyzed to date. In addition, while they say that their list may not be exhaustive, they collected their data both through an Internet search, and from faculty listed in entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and nonprofit management databases and list-serves. Each syllabus they collected was then coded independently by two authors. They had two rounds of “practice coding” in order to refine the category descriptions and make sure that there was agreement among the authors.
Brock and Steiner analyze 13 definitions of social entrepreneurship, and identify 7 concepts most often cited in these definitions. We conducted a similar exercise as part of the minor at IIT-M, but using fewer definitions. The concepts Brock and Steiner identify are social problems/needs, opportunity recognition, innovation, scalability, resource acquisition, sustainable business model and measuring outcomes. They then provide a brief paragraph describing each, and suggest that these are the most important topics in social entrepreneurship education. While this provides a useful guide to the topics that any overview of social entrepreneurship should cover, it could be refined further.
Amongst Brock and Steiner’s findings, I was most interested in the tabulation of the top fifteen articles assigned by instructors. What surprised me is that none of the literature on the Bottom of the Pyramid is included amongst these fifteen articles. My suspicion is that social entrepreneurship courses, which are predominantly offered by universities in the U.S. and Europe, also tend to focus on social entrepreneurship in the West. There may be good reasons for this, which include the availability of practitioners as guest faculty, and of service learning opportunities in close proximity. However, the questions I am left with are, “How transferable is the knowledge gained through these courses to social entrepreneurship in the developing world? Are the social entrepreneurship courses offered in developing countries substantially different from those offered in the West, either in terms of readings, or in other ways?”
Disclaimer: Devyani Srinivasan is a former employee of Villgro Innovations Foundation, the organization which jointly offers the minor course on Innovation and Social Enterprise with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Innovation Research for Low-Income Countries
Can innovation be studied as a field of science? What benefits are derived by doing so? Who are the subjects of innovation studies?
These are the questions that authors Jo Lorentzen and Rahma Mohamed answer in their paper, ‘Where are the Poor in Innovation Studies.’
The authors point out that while the study of innovation has been around for more than 50 years, very little work has been done on understanding low-income countries or regions. The paper goes on to explore the role played by innovation in development and discusses possible reasons for why so little has been focused on low-income countries.
Through a review of innovation literature addressing innovation for the poor, the authors point out that most research was not done by innovation scholars, and tended to focus more on issues of livelihood, especially agriculture and health. Their concluding ananlysis of the study of innovation is that research for low-income countries would benefit extensively from a synthesis of “economic analysis of technological learning and sociological analysis of innovation diffusion.”
Read the entire paper here.
Social Entrepreneurship Research
Social entrepreneurship is often seen as differing from other forms of entrepreneurship in the relatively larger emphasis put on social benefit over monetary benefit. However, a key component to entrepreneurship remains — that is, the need and ability to demonstrate profitability to ensure scale and long term viability, which in turn maximize social benefit.
As a field of scholarly investigation, social entrepreneurship provides a unique opportunity to constantly challenge and rethink standard business and management assumptions.
Social enterprise research is therefore often “a source of explanation, prediction, and delight,” according to IESE Business School academics, Johanna Mair and Ignasi Marti. Their article, Social Entrepreneurship Research: A Source of Explanation, Prediction and Delight,” elaborates on the view that social entrepreneurship is a process that catalyzes social change and addresses social need in a way not dominated by direct financial benefit for the entrepreneur.
The article explores several themes along the way. Crucially, it distinguishes social enterprises from regular enterprises as the “relative priority given to social wealth creation versus economic wealth creation.”
Therefore the authors believe, the concept of embededness (or social value within economic value) as the nexus between the ideas and theoretical perspectives for the study of social entrepreneurship introduced in the last section.
These theoretical perspectives are divided as follows:
Structuration Theory: That it is impossible to detach the agent (social entrepreneur) from the sturcture (community, society).
Institutional Entrepreneurship: These are actors who have an interest in modifying institutional sturctures or creating new ones. They leverage resources to create new institutions and transform existing ones.
Social Capital: This is broadly defined by researchers as actual and potential assets embedded in relationships among individuals, communities, networks and societies.
Social Movements: Which researchers have found focus their efforts on four key issues: a) political opportunities and threats, b) resource mobilizing structures and active appropriation of sites for mobilization, c) collective action frames and identity formation; and d) established reportoires of contention and innovative collective action by challengers and their member opponents.
Read the entire article here.
Social Entreprise Typology
The Social Enterprise Typology document that definies the various kinds of enterprises that exist in this flourishing sector. The typology, published by Virtue Ventures, and authored by Kim Alter, explores how institutions have combined a mix of social values and goals with commercial business practices, which have lead to different ownership models, income and capitalization stratergies and systems to maximize social value. The classifications used serve as a guide to navigate readers through an often poorly-defined, diverse and dynamic landscape.
Read more about the typology here.
Barriers to Household Risk Management: Evidence from India
Microinsurance is fast emerging as an important component to comprehensive financial service offerings to the BoP. Recognizing that often the poor fall back into poverty due to financial setbacks caused by illness, accident, death or natural destruction, several organizations are introducing policies that will help mitigate risk better – for example XAC Bank in Mongolia (where the population is nomadic and heavily dependent on the cattle trade), offers farmers livestock insurance.
This paper analyzes the risk mitigation strategies employed among farmers in India. In particular the team at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) Center for Microinsurance (CMF), looks at the adoption of rainfall insurance products designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in case of poor rainfall during the monsoon season. The study compares patterns between Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, and offers lessons based on their findings.
Read the entire article here.
Methodology and Procedures in Field Trials
Field studies on livestock are a difficult task as it involves many variables. These variables could affect the overall results of the experiment. These variables could range from loss of livestock, sudden dropout of the dairymen from the experimental studies etc. In order to offset such limitations this article suggests some simple but effective criteria that are useful while conducting the field studies on dairy cattle.
Read the entire article here.