Forty leading social entrepreneurs in the Schwab Foundation convened at HKS for the first-ever executive education module focused on creating systemic change using late-stage social enterprises.
The course was developed jointly by Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Education Program, Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs, with the objective of immersing participants in systems thinking for social change.
Funded by a donation from David Rubenstein, the Co-Founder of The Carlyle Group, the course is co-chaired by David Gergen, Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and Mark Moore, Hauser Professor of Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard Kennedy School, and features several additional professors from Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School including Harvard Business School professor Kash Rangan and Harvard Business School/Harvard Kennedy School professor Dutch Leonard. Program participants will be exposed to the world’s top scholars and explore innovative approaches and collaborative opportunities to achieve system level change.
“Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurs are the most sophisticated and scaled social entrepreneurs in the world. They are at stages in their own career trajectories that allow them to move beyond their individual organizational agendas and to begin to think at the system level,” said David Gergen. “These entrepreneurs recognize that relying on organizational growth alone is insufficient to meet global need. The key to creating broader systemic change that they—and we—all seek is mobilization of a much larger set of actors. How you go about doing that is exactly what we’ve been discussing with them in Cambridge this week.”
“Our social entrepreneurs have the vision, ingenuity, and skills to affect system change,” said Hilde Schwab, Co-Founder and Chairperson of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. “Through their successful organizations, they have proven that social issues can be tackled with scalable, replicable business models. The question now facing the sector is how to create change on a larger scale than what you can reach alone by growing your organization. That requires influencing change at the system level, and HKS—a renowned institution around the world—is an ideal partner to work with our social entrepreneurs not only their organizations, but their solutions, worldwide.”
