The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and Harvard Kennedy School have launched the first bespoke executive education course on social entrepreneurship, titled “The Art and Science of System Change.”

Forty leading late-stage social entrepreneurs in the Schwab Foundation network have just concluded a week-long executive education module on creating systemic change.

The course was developed jointly by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs, Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Education Program, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, 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.

“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,” remarked 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’ll be discussing with them in Cambridge this week,” he added.

Hilde Schwab, the co-founder and chairperson of the Foundation, said: "Our social entrepreneurs have the vision, ingenuity, and skills to affect system change."

"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," he noted.

"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," he added.-TradeArabia News Service