Venture for Social Enterprise™ program provides participants with an intensive, “hands-on” course focusing on the creation, evaluation, development, and launch readiness of new social enterprises. Designing, implementing and scaling social entrepreneurial solutions for the benefit of marginalized populations is extremely challenging. It requires intervening in complex and hard-wired systems where the social entrepreneur encounters entrenched stakeholders, long-standing social and cultural norms, limited capital, and situations of high uncertainty. It is more often than not the “simple” solutions that catalyze systems change and create the most profound social impact.

Program Benefits

At the highest level, you will come away with clear answers to the following questions:

• What are the issues, tensions, and relationships faced by social entrepreneurs as they build new enterprises designed for social impact?
• What are common enablers and barriers in social venture development and execution?
• How to develop an operational model to test your assumptions about products and services?
• How do you assess current best practices in order to build a scalable social venture?
• How to build credible financials based on reasonable, benchmarked assumptions?
• What are the fundamentals of aid and key sources for early funding?
• What metrics are critical to measure and monitor new venture success?
• How to build the right team and culture for successful launch and early stage success?

Program Content

The program uses a proprietary sequence of modules and tools to support the identification and solution of major social problems. Specific skill development and issues covered include:

• Design Thinking: Understanding how to apply design thinking techniques to support early problem identification and solution formation
• Opportunity Identification: Articulating the problem to be solved and the potential benefit to the customer
• Model Development: Turning your new social venture idea into a scalable model
• Customer Discovery: Testing your assumptions about the alignment between your service offerings and targeted customers
• Early Product/Service Development: Building minimal viable products/services to test customer acceptance and use
• Key Partners: Understanding the local ecosystem to facilitate important relationships to help support customer needs holistically
• Funding Models: Identifying sources of sustainable funding
• Impact Metrics: Identifying critical impact indicators for outcome assessment, benchmarking & monitoring
• Team Leadership: Selecting team members with the right mix of knowledge and skills

Venture for Social Enterprise Brochure