(Presented by: Prof. Alejandro Crawford, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bard MBA in Sustainability at Bard College; Dr. Sebastian Groh, Associate Professor of BRAC University, Managing Director of SOLshare; Prof. Hector Hernández, Leadership Professor of Universidad de los Andes; Prof. Bermet Suiutbekova, Social Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking Concentration Coordinator at American University of Central Asia/ Moderated by: Prof. Alejandro Crawford, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bard MBA in Sustainability at Bard College)
Social entrepreneurship is the process of building new organisations that offer scalable solutions to social and environmental challenges. Faculty members of the Open Society University Network (OSUN) suggest students who have an interest to become social entrepreneurs to think critically, gain global awareness on social issues, and consider disrupting the current broken systems in order to recognise broader opportunities for change.
The International USR Summit 2022, co-organised by the University Social Responsibility Network (USRN) and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), was held online from 16 to 18 November 2022 with a theme of “Education and Action for a Sustainable Future”.
Professor Alejandro Crawford, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bard MBA in Sustainability at Bard College in New York, moderated a parallel panel entitled “Collaborative Education for SDG Solutions: The OSUN Global Certificate in Social Enterprise and Leading Change” in the Summit. He leads the global team of co-instructors for OSUN’s Social Entrepreneurship Practicum.
Professor Crawford noted that people around the world have the power to build a just and regenerative world provided there are opportunities for young people to discover their powers to disruptively replace broken systems and learn to use them by proving out alternatives. He started the session by asking the panellists their thoughts on the power that they wish to release.
“To start from something small,” responded Dr Sebastian Groh, Associate Professor at BRAC University in Bangladesh and Managing Director of SOLshare, a cleantech start-up.
“Lots and lots of small things can be developed into something big. We see this in nature in the creation of swarms or schools of fish,” Dr Groh believed that an army of social entrepreneurs from across the world can be formed with swarm intelligence.
He added, “I want to stress that innovation can come from anywhere.” He further illustrated with the example of electric mobility. “If we look at electric vehicles, I’m sure that most of us here in the room right now think about cars,” he challenged the Summit participants.
“But that’s not what’s driving the revolution in electric mobility. If you compare the number of electric cars on the road with the number of electric 2-wheelers and 3-wheelers, especially in the global South, we have 20 times more penetration of electric 2- and 3-wheelers. Cars are a joke compared to them,” he said.
He continued by driving a disruptive change to shift the concepts of most people on the big names. “Bangladesh is known as a country that has more electric vehicles than Tesla has sold in the whole world,” he continued, “should I only focus my money, resources, and brain power on these Silicon Valley’s (vehicles)? Or would it make sense to also look at the Bangalore’s, the Dhaka’s, the Jakarta’s (vehicles) where the numbers are much larger, where I can gather more intelligence and data, and possibly can drive this revolution even faster and have a much deeper impact?”
Dr Groh believed that besides innovating and designing for local circumstances, gaining global awareness and working together can drive faster progress in innovation.
Professor Hector Hernández, Leadership Professor at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, echoed the building of awareness, including awareness of the problems and the power to solve the problems.
“For many of us the problems that are out there…maybe the government’s responsibility, maybe other people’s responsibility. You know like…somebody has created a problem; somebody is expected to resolve that somehow miraculously,” he said.
Professor Hernández believed that exchanging views on issues happening in other countries can help provide insights to solve the problems in one’s own community.
“For instance, when I heard that there was a group of students in Jerusalem working in lowering the rate of child marriage, I thought and I discussed this with my students,” he recalled. “We might not have this as evidently as it is there. But when they mentioned it, I started thinking that maybe we have very similar problems that are as difficult and as challenging as that child marriage. Like certain types of violence, or certain elements of our culture about gender and exclusion,” he said.
Professor Bermet Suiutbekova, Social Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking Concentration Coordinator at American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, suggested adopting the bottom-up approach as an essential of disruptive innovation, and have empathy in understanding the problems that marginalised populations face. “I believe that design thinking helps me and my students look into the problems by emphasising on empathy,” she said.
“Like who the underserved people are, what matters to them, how the solution fits their life, what motivates and discourages the people, the point they experience frustration,” she continued, “by actually addressing all these, students can learn, understand, see, feel and do what is meaningful.”
Professor Alejandro Crawford echoed and added, “We need to act experimentally, we need to learn the entrepreneurial skills of testing our ideas until they can become viable.” According to Professor Crawford who is also the CEO of RebelBase, which teaches entrepreneurial thinking as a form of basic literacy, this not only applies to businesses but also social initiatives and non-profits.
OSUN and the Graduate Programmes in Sustainability at Bard College, in collaboration with faculty at other OSUN institutions, offer a global certificate training in social enterprise and leading change for undergraduate and graduate students to form teams to ideate and develop models for social enterprises.
“It’s very essential that students get a reality check and really work hard to make this a solution which actually works not on slides but in reality,” he concluded.
International USR Summit 2022 Parallel Session I-A: Collaborative Education for SDG Solutions: The OSUN Global Certificate in Social Enterprise and Leading Change
by Prof. Alejandro Crawford, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bard MBA in Sustainability at Bard College; Dr. Sebastian Groh, Associate Professor of BRAC University, Managing Director of SOLshare; Prof. Hector Hernández, Leadership Professor of Universidad de los Andes; Prof. Bermet Suiutbekova, Social Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking Concentration Coordinator at American University of Central Asia
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