Perspective | Linking business skills and social drive | Interactive feature

Seven years ago, the Penn International Business Volunteers organized three summer consulting trips to work with Non-Governmental Organizations in developing countries.

Last year, the organization turned away many of the applicants for its ten consulting trips, marking an impressive growth in interest.

The group is just one of many that introduces students to social entrepreneurship, allowing them to translate their business knowledge into real world social applications.

"There is a misperception that business and social good can't overlap," Wharton and College junior and PIBV President Julie Han said.

"As nonprofit consultants, we prove you can use business to improve the world."

From markets to microfinance

A social entrepreneur is someone who uses business principles to organize or manage a venture for social change.

But the term social entrepreneurship is used to describe different concepts, according to Legal Studies and Business Ethics professor Nien-he Hsieh.

Social entrepreneurship, in one sense, describes for-profit business models that address social challenges in the public sector, often through market extension, he said.

Microfinance, for example, provides financial services to low-income clients who traditionally aren't eligible for loans.

Another aspect of social entrepreneurship is working or consulting in the nonprofit sector - in this case, business models are used without concern for profit.

According to Hsieh, there have always been social entrepreneurs. But recently, many high-profile entrepreneurs who were successful in the business world are "looking to find ways to continue what they like doing while also addressing social problems and finding meaning in their lives," he said.

Social entrepreneurship has become a "hot topic" in the nonprofit sector as well. Successful businesspeople expect the non-profits they support with grant money to adopt effective and efficient business models, said Douglas Bauer, senior vice president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Penn adjunct Urban Studies professor.

Another recent driving force of social entrepreneurship are the priorities set by President Barack Obama. As a former community organizer, Bauer said, Obama is aware of the importance of the nonprofit sector and has pledged to help it.

According to Bauer, business and social-work schools across the country are "looking for ways to make our communities function more effectively."

What Penn Offers

Under the auspice of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, the Wharton Societal Wealth Program - founded in 2001 - seeks to support business entrepreneurship that solves social problems by using a for-profit model in areas such as healthcare, education and unemployment.

The group works primarily as business consultants for small companies, the program's director James Thompson said.

For example, the program helped found The Khayelitsha Cookie Co. - which sells high-quality cookies made in South Africa in the United States.

"The beauty of the program is that we get to access resources from disparate parts of Penn to work on common projects," Thompson said, adding that being based on a college campus is an important advantage.

Thompson also said undergraduates play a major role in many of the projects, often conducting much of the preliminary research for a venture and helping build assessment models.

The Wharton Business Plan Competition, which is also a part of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, does not have programming that focuses solely on social entrepreneurship, but many of the student-created ventures have social implications, Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs managing director Emily Cieri said.

The Wharton Small Business Development Center engages undergraduate and MBA students in consulting projects as well as providing clients with business courses.

Wharton currently has one class that focuses on societal wealth venturing available for graduate and undergraduate students, Cieri said.

The course was built around research conducted by the Wharton Societal Wealth Program and focuses on building for-profit business models that also address social problems.

Penn offers other social impact classes outside of Wharton. For instance, Bauer teaches a Urban Studies course that focuses on the role of philanthropy and non-profits in urban communities. Other related classes are offered in the School of Social and Public Policy.

Where Penn is headed

But Bauer encouraged the Penn administration to make social entrepreneurship a greater component of the curriculum.

"It needs to be taught at a university level as part of formal education," he said, adding that the curricula at Yale, Stanford, Harvard and University of California, Berkeley all have a greater emphasis on social entrepreneurship.

In order to expand its social entrepreneurship programming, Leonard Lodish was recently appointed as the first Wharton Vice Dean of the Program for Social Impact and Valerie Malter was appointed as the new Wharton Director for Social Initiatives.

Lodish - who just started a few days ago - said he will work to "leverage Wharton's unique impact ... because we aren't getting the credit we deserve."

The programming that Penn currently has in place to help students use business models to do social good is "the beginning of the beginning," said Ira Harkavy, vice president for the Netter Center for Community Partnerships.

"There is great interest from students across Penn, not only to engage the resources of the University to help the economic development of West Philadelphia, but also to serve as a model for what all universities can do to improve economic development," he said.

Snapshot of Student Involvements

Many students, however, are not waiting for the administration to create more chances to get involved in social entrepreneurship - they're building opportunities themselves.

The Social Impact Consulting Group was founded two years ago by a group of undergraduate students committed to applying business skills to the nonprofit sector.

The group matches students with a local nonprofit organization and provides them with the training and resources necessary to advise local businesses in areas ranging from education to healthcare.

As the undergraduate pilot program of Net Impact - a similar organization targeted toward MBA students and professionals - Penn's SIC Group "offers a unique opportunity for the application of knowledge with real clients so students can make a real impact," Wharton senior and SIC Group President Trang To said.

Recently, the group partnered with the Gesu Institute, through which they provided a local school with recommendations for cost reductions, To said.

Other student groups look beyond the Penn community to engage in social entrepreneurial ventures.

Han traveled to Mexico City last summer with PIBV, where she worked with The Hunger Project, an organization that connects local citizens with resources to become self-sustainable.

Han and the other PIBV members helped The Hunger Project revamp its fundraising strategies.

"We wanted to motivate and empower people to lift themselves out of poverty," Han said, adding that PIBV works toward this goal by "helping NGOs become sustainable so they can help their communities."

Penn Engineers Without Borders works on infrastructure development projects in poor rural villages.

PennEWB seeks out and forms five-year partnerships with marginalized communities which have no running water or electricity.

"The talent and expertise is locally sourced from the community," Engineering senior and PennEWB President Jay Parekh said. "We facilitate it with design work and project-management type of skills."

Recently PennEWB members traveled to Honduras to help build a clean-water distribution system and later a waste management system.

To ensure economic sustainability, "we usually never complete the projects," Parekh said, adding that it is important for the community to build and help pay for the infrastructure so "that if something breaks they will want to fix it."

For both PIBV and PennEWB, the cost of sending volunteers around the world to work on development projects deters many students from participating.

Funding is almost completely out-of-pocket, according to Han.

PennEWB funds the material costs of its projects through corporate sponsorship and grants. Students who travel to implement project designs pay for and receive two course credits - the tuition fee covers travel and lodging.

All three organizations stressed that membership is not limited to Wharton and Engineering students.

These groups provide students with a unique opportunity to apply the theories that they learn in class to service activities, said Hsieh, who is a faculty advisor for the Social Impact Consulting Group.

He added that the field of social entrepreneurship is "interesting, exciting, in a lot of flux right now."

"My hope is that Penn and Wharton will help move the field forward," he said.

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