“The business of doing good” reviews the new textbook “Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship,” a guide for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to use a data-driven approach to making a difference. Based on a course at Harvard, this book is suitable for both classroom and corporate settings, and for self learners.

Fig. 1.

A remarkable feature of the book is that it contains a wide array of offerings including tools and templates, assignments, examples of social entrepreneurship, and interviews with social entrepreneurs and thought leaders from around the world. These include recognized names such as Bill Drayton, Prof Mohammed Yunus, Sir Ronald Cohen, Sir Fazle Abed, H.E. Dr. Laila Iskandar, and many others. The author wittily combines robust academic instruction with humor and her own experience in building the social entrepreneurship sector. A key point of emphasis is that social entrepreneurship does not necessarily entail starting new ventures, but also thinking entrepreneurially about mobilizing resources – including people – in existing organizations.

After having founded a multi-million dollar technology research lab and advised thousands of ambitious students over the years, I found Dr. Chahine’s textbook to be immensely valuable. It builds on the work of others, including existing resources from various sources, and synthesizes them all into one unified framework. Dr. Chahine challenges the reader to take these resources and apply them, question them, transform them and create new frameworks for the future. She instructs her readers to question all assumptions and challenge the status quo. With this book in their toolbelt, aspiring changemakers are well equipped.

Omar Bagasra
Department of Biology, Claflin University, Orangeburg, SC 29115, USA
School of Medicine, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA

Publication

The business of doing good.
Bagasra O
Science. 2016 Oct 21

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