IDPT 407: SE Syllabus, Spring 2010

IDPT 407: LocalSocial Entrepreneurship Internship

Seminar Syllabus[1]

Spring 2010

Overview

Social Entrepreneurship (SE) is the process of creative thinking, innovation, risk-taking, and analysis that creates opportunities with sustainable social and economic value. This internship has two parts, a series of seminar The Social Entrepreneurship Internship asks you to serve in a consulting capacity with a local nonprofit organization. Your goal is to help the nonprofit develop a written plan to support or refine or improve the delivery of its social mission. Most assignments involve writing business plans that pursue the dual purpose of financial and social return. Integral to the internship is a seminar that will prepare you for your consulting functions. This seminar/internship package is a graded academic course (on an S/NC basis). Successful participants will receive 0.5 course credits.

Seminar Objectives

The seminar is an introduction to SE. The goals of the seminar are:

  1. To demonstrate the value of entrepreneurship in the economy,
  2. To introduce the kinds of thinking that business and nonprofit leaders do as part of their activities.
  3. To prepare you to write a feasibility plan on behalf of your non-profit client.

Weencourage and expect each of you to participate actively during the seminar and internship. Seminarattendance is required. You are responsible for all material disseminated in the seminar and on the seminar website. To ensure you get email alerts that we send out, you are required to check your Wooster email account daily.

If you have any questions regarding this course, we strongly encourage you to ask one of the teaching faculty.

Teaching and advising faculty

Participating Teaching and Advising Faculty / Participating Advising Faculty
Dr. A. Moledina (AM/SE Director)
Dr. J. Roche (JR)
Dr. R. Ormiston (RO)
Dr. L Verdon (LV) / Dr. M. Broda

Contact information for each of the faculty members will be listed on Woodle. The default room for the seminar is Morgan 201.

Course Requirements and Grading

In order to receive credit, you must complete both the seminar and internship components of the course. The seminar will take place from 8:30am – 5:00pm on the following dates: January 8, 9, 16, 30, and February 6th and 27th, 2010. Following the seminar, you are expected to devote at least 36 hours to the internship component working with the local nonprofit organization to which you have been assigned (a log for tracking these hours will be distributed to you). Activities undertaken as part of the internship include time spent meeting with your nonprofit contacts and those associated with the development of a business plan for the profit-seeking enterprise. The 36-hour commitment must be completed on March 29th, 2010. The log should be submitted to your faculty team advisor weekly.

The business plan is due to your advisor on March 22th, 2009. The advisor will have a few days to return the plan to you with final comments. After final comments, the final plan is due to your clients on March 29th.

In addition, we have arranged a business plan competition where you will be competing with each other for cash prizes. The competition and presentations will be held on April 3rd.

Student teams are required to make three presentations. The first, on February 6th is an opportunity to get feedback from all faculty advisors, student teams and an outside audience, the second is an update on Feb 27th; the final is on, April 3rd is a chance to showcase your team’s work and compete for cash prizes in the business plan competition.

There are no examinations in this internship. Reading, active participation, well written work, critical thinking and responsible and mature behavior are expected of you. These will be evaluated by the faculty teaching the seminar. Your grade for IDPT 407 (S/NC) will be determined by Dr. Moledina with input from the faculty teaching or advising in the seminar as well as from your nonprofit contacts. We will also consider input from your peers with respect to your participation in team activities.

Table 1: SE Spring 2010 timetable

January 8-9 (Friday to Sat) / SE Seminar begins.
January 16th (Sat) / SE Seminar continues
January 30th (Sat) / SE Seminar continues.
February 6th (Sat am) / Initial pitch presentations
February 27th (Sat am) / Mid-term Check-in
March 29th / Business plan due
April 3rd (Sat) / Pitch/competitions/ Debriefing
April 8th (Thursday, 7pm) / SE Dinner

Seminar Timetable

The tentative timetable for the seminar components is given in Table 2.

Table 2: Tentative Seminar Timetable

Time / Friday
January 8th / Saturday
January 9th / Saturday 2
January 16th / Saturday 3
January 30th / Saturday 4
February 6th
8:00-9:00 / Arrival and intro: (AM and all).
Ice-breaker (JR) / The pursuit of profit (R0)
Why make a plan? What are the components of a business plan? (LV) / Case study: Rethinking Past SE Ideas within the context of fundamentals I-II (JR) / Social Venture Capital workshop with Global SE
9:00-10:00 / What is SE? The double bottom line. (AM) / Fundamentals I: Product and markets (AM) / Fundamentals III: Production decisions (RO) / Location and Times TBA
BREAK
10:15-12:00 / Non-profits.
SE in Wayne County and Introduce past SE Ideas (JR) / Fundamentals II: Organizational fit and feasibility (LV) / Fundamentals IV Marketing (RO) / Recap past lessons (AM/RO/JR) / Student presentations and Summary
LUNCH
1:00-3:00 / Meet the participating nonprofits (Morgan 201) / Group dynamics and Collaborative technologies(JR/MB) / Consulting issues. (Sandeep Bhatia and Adam Roth) / Assessing value (Anne Nurse)
BREAK
3:15-4:00 / Deconstruct the projects (All)
(Morgan 217) / Fundamentals V: Timing and finances (LV)
4:05-5:00 / Debriefing. Organize identified elements into the curriculum. (All)
(Morgan 217) / What next? Discuss timelines and logistics (AM) / Case study: Apply fundamentals III-V (LV)

A brief note on using Woodle

The class website is at the following address Please visit this site regularly because we will post announcements, notes, articles for you to read and other course related information. For those of you that need help, please see any member of the teaching faculty.

Required Reading[3]

Friday January 8th, 2009

Session name / Reading
What is SE? (AM) / Dees, J. Gregory, Jed Emerson and Peter Economy. ‘Chapter 1: Social Entrepreneurship.” In Enterprising Nonprofits: A toolkit for social entrepreneurs. John Wiley and Sons (2001).
PBS Now [Online] Green Collar Jobs. In the Show Enterprising Ideas. Available online at
Non-profits and past SE Ideas
(JR)

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[1] This syllabus is a working document. It is updated from time to time.

[2] Our Woodle course will not be live until early in January.

[3] All articles and required reading will be uploaded to Woodle or emailed to you. This list will become longer the closer we get to the seminar.