Design for the Business of Change

About

Social entrepreneurship is a rapidly developing approach blurring boundaries between non-profits, governments, corporations, and business. It is the entrepreneurs using business methods to help solve social and environmental challenges that make social enterprise distinct from other forms of business. Such a strategy allows problems otherwise ignored or missed by commerce and addressed predominately with often unsustainable donor-driven models by the nonprofit sector to become an object of assistance as well as of profit.

This course will provide an overview of social entrepreneurship by looking into societal problems they address and innovative business models to tackle them. Students will also be introduced the key methodological and epistemic instruments of design and ethnography in order to conduct ethnographic fieldwork and design new strategies.

Course leader

Ladislav Tyll, MBA, Ph.D.

Target group

The course is designed for maximum 25 Master or Bachelor students (eventually Ph.D. students) across various fields of study.

Course aim

The course has two main objectives: (1) Training in intensive ethnographic methods including interviews and participant observation fieldwork; and (2) Exposure to important debates surrounding the contemporary social and environmental issues together with design thinking, ethnography and the art of participant observation fieldwork.

Students will learn to be critical of design’s role in shaping and transforming social structures that both empower and endanger users.

Fee info