Knowledge Items
Social Ventures as Learning Laboratories
By J. Gregory Dees In this article, Greg Dees argues that, in the wake of the financial crisis, we need “entrepreneurship that creates greater long-term value while drawing on fewer resources and generating fewer destructive consequences”. Financial pressures cause social problems to become even more pressing, and social entrepreneurs can help put us back on […]
2009 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award: Jacqueline Novogratz
The 2009 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award presentation to Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder and CEO of Acumen Fund
Philanthropy and Enterprise: Harnessing the Power of Business and Social Entrepreneurship for Development
By J. Gregory Dees Social entrepreneurs and supportive philanthropists are challenging conventional assumptions by deliberately using business ventures to serve the public good. This idea of using market forces in strategic ways to promote social improvements is not new, but what is new is the openness and enthusiasm with which entrepreneurial, market-oriented approaches are being […]
Rhetoric, Reality, and Research: Building a Solid Foundation for the Practice of Social Entrepreneurship
By Beth Battle Anderson and J. Gregory Dees Beth Anderson and Greg Dees raise questions about some of the rhetoric around “earned income strategies” in arguing that the nascent field of social entrepreneurship needs to build a strong foundation of rigorous, yet practically-oriented, research, particularly by engaging business school researchers. Chapter 7 in Social Entrepreneurship: […]
Cultivate Your Ecosystem
by Paul N. Bloom and J. Gregory Dees Social entrepreneurs not only must understand the broad environment in which they work, but also must shape those environments to support their goals, when feasible. Borrowing insights from the field of ecology, the authors offer an ecosystems framework to help social entrepreneurs create long-lasting and significant social […]
Taking Social Entrepreneurship Seriously
By J. Gregory Dees The article discusses the concept of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship emerged in the 1980s from the work of Bill Drayton that provided fund for social innovators around the world. It comes into its own in the last decade, and captures the imaginations of many thoughtful observers. It has the potential to […]
Girls on the Run International: “A Lot More than a Running Program”
By Paul N. Bloom Girls on the Run International oversees an educational program that puts pre-teen girls through a 12-week curriculum that uses running-related activities to teach self-respect and healthy living habits. From its start in 1996 as a small, after-school activity with 13 girls from Charlotte, North Carolina, Girls on the Run grew to […]
How Social-Cause Marketing Affects Consumer Perceptions
By Paul N. Bloom, Steve Hoeffler, Kevin Lane Keller and Carlos E. Basurto Meza How should companies determine the best way to allocate marketing dollars between conventional promotional programs and affinity marketing programs? The former simply stress the benefits of buying a specific brand, while the latter prominently and publicly identify a company’s association with […]
Framing a Theory of Social Entrepreneurship: Building on Two Schools of Practice and Thought
By J. Gregory Dees and Beth Battle Anderson Social entrepreneurship has been gaining momentum as an academic subject. In the past decade, numerous schools, particularly, but not exclusively, business schools, have launched new courses, programs, centers, or research initiatives embracing variations on this theme. Even with this flurry of activity, as a field of intellectual […]
The Aaron Diamond Foundation: AIDS Research in New York City
By Matthew T.A. Nash A history of the tribulations involved in launching the Aaron Diamond Foundation and the decision-making involved in its entry into the field of AIDS research. Was funding an AIDS research laboratory good fit for the Aaron Diamond Foundation? Should the Foundation attempt to convene a consortium of foundations or not? If […]