<aside> 💡 “When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.” ― Steve Job

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Course raison d'être

• Growth-oriented, technology-enabled entrepreneurship has transformed countless sectors in the last century, from back-end business processes to taken-for-granted downstream customer behaviours. For example, a critical mass of citizens understand that a “tweet” does not refer to birdsong and many freely post updates to their Facebook status (or TikTok channel), intuitively understanding the appeal of these once emergent digital products.
• Yet alongside the growth in resources for entrepreneurs and innovators interested in increasing clicks and profit, founders, investors and policy-makers have been exploring venture as a vehicle to achieve personally-meaningful goals beyond market ‘domination,’ or a Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon acquisition/acqui-hire or an Initial Public Offering.
• To clarify: successfully expanding your market or exiting your entrepreneurial projects are not unwelcome outcomes; they are indeed key entrepreneurship milestones. However, these are not exhaustive milestones of success. The aim of this course is to offer you the tools to develop personally meaningful frameworks to guide your venture to success. Meaning, when/if your ventures do achieve commercial success, you will be doubly proud of what the venture has achieved and stands for.
• This course has been designed to help you identify, break and bridge the artificial division constructed between the objectives of profit-oriented entrepreneurship and the objectives that truly motivate innovators to embark on their entrepreneurial adventure (deviating from potentially highly comfortable and profitable alternative paths). Through practical and academic exercises, you will explore venture as an opportunity to create wide-spread societal change in a financially sustainable an even profitable way.
• The aim of this course is thus not to dissuade or prevent you from creating profitable entrepreneurial projects, but rather offer you the opportunity to actively explore pathways for an entrepreneurial project in which you and others will motivated to invest time and money. Research suggests that businesses who do not grasp this imperative will not be able to maintain the interest of the world’s most talented and capable individuals. The last ten years already demonstrate that as many as 58% of Gen Y—individuals born 1980-2000— a significant proportion of today’s workforce, were willing to take a 15% pay cut to work for a firm that mirrors their values, while 45% were willing to take a 15% pay cut to work for a firm that makes a social or environmental difference (Net Impact, 2012). Gen Z (born after 1996) have similar views to Gen Y, are even more cynical towards corporate actors and are stronger digital natives (Pew 2020; CBS News, 2020).
• The course offers you an industry-agnostic foundation for identifying, evaluating and exploiting opportunities to bring your social, economic and/or environmental vision to fruition (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Stephan et al., 2016). While you will develop a venture concept that introduces new products and/or services that address critical social and/or environmental issues, course material will be applicable in both new and established businesses or organizations, including in the public sector, private sector and in the emerging third sector. You will be able to offer insight into this emerging group of businesses who refuse the dichotomy between professional development (including competitivity, revenue-generation) and personal meaning (including making progress towards the critical social and environmental issues of our time).