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Prof Stephan Chambers Marshall Institute, 44 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 focuses on three critical aspects of social business: entrepreneurship; strategy; and leadership.  It focuses on both existing organisations and start-ups as vehicles for social change, and aims to support ‘intrapreneurs’ as well as entrepreneurs. Its purpose is to bring students’ understanding of the worlds of opportunity and venture into clear organisational focus, and to develop their skills as an altruistic leader.  It begins to sensitise students to the challenges of starting, running, and leading mission-based organisations, explores established vehicles for combining social and commercial purpose, and examines strategy development where the imperative is not market-capture but the reversal of market failure. 

Students will be introduced to the main elements of entrepreneurial planning including opportunity identification and evaluation, rapid prototyping and resource-gathering.  They will explore the business model canvas and ideas of lean start-up.  Critiques of over-simplified, heroic or ‘solutionist’ models of social entrepreneurship will be explored. They will consider the main techniques for planning and implementing activities to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities, including customer journeys, sources of advantage, competencies, and the resource-based view of the firm.  Students will be provided with a foundation in organisational behaviour, drawing on research in psychology and sociology, to understand the behaviour and attitudes of people in organisations. The theories and research will address these topics generally, and place them in the context of social business by applying them to case studies and problems faced by leaders of social businesses.

There will be ten integrated lecture/seminars of three hours each, delivered across two modules.

A practice coursework assignment.

• Allman, Keith A. and Ximena Escobar De Nogales (2015). Impact Investment: A Practical Guide to Investment Process and Social Impact Analysis. Hoboken, New Jersey
• Bhide, Amar V. (1996).  "The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer". Harvard Business Review November.
• Blank, Steve (2013). "Why Lean Start-Up Changes Everything". Harvard Business Review May
• Nicholls, Alex and Jed Emerson (2015). "Social Finance, Capitalizing Social impact".  In Alex Nicholls, Rob Paton and Jed Emerson (eds) Social Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Stevenson, Howard H. and David E. Gumpert (1985).  "The Heart of Entrepreneurship". Harvard Business Review March
• Robert M. Grant (2010).  Contemporary Strategy Analysis. Oxford: Wiley. Part 1 ‘The concept of strategy’
• A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, (2013). Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works.   Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press

Coursework (100%).

Assessment will be through an individual coursework assignment (100%) comprised of 2 essay questions.