Global Impact Lab: Co-Creating Sustainable Innovation

Global Impact Lab is a course that brings together students from around the world who jointly experiment with ways to create social and environmental impact through entrepreneurship. As part of a global program driving disruptive change, the course stands out for its unique approach to global change-making and its collaborative setup, which brings together more than ten institutions from around the world. This course can be taken fully online upon a substantiated request (e.g., in the case of a semester abroad)As part of a global program driving disruptive change, this course prepares you to tackle social and environmental challenges around the world with experimental solutions of your own. The course is unique both for its approach to global change-making, and for its collaborative setup that brings together more than ten institutions from around the world. This course can be taken fully online upon substantiated request (e.g. in case of a semester abroad).

The course trains you in social entrepreneurship, understood as the process of building new organizations that offer scalable solutions to social and environmental challenges. In the course, you learn how to design experiments and build persuasive business models with an integrated bottom line; demonstrating their feasibility, marketability, scalability, and potential returns; and recruiting the resources, talent, and access to take them to market. You will profit from the expertise of more than ten co-instructors from around the world, several of whom are successful entrepreneurs themselves; and from input by TU/e lecturers. The course has been designed and is led by Alejandro Crawford, professor at Bard college (US) which ranks first worldwide for its MBA in Sustainability and MBA for Nonprofits.

In this course, you work in international and interdisciplinary student teams that ideate and develop models for social enterprises. Next to feedback that you receive from co-instructors in global sessions, the course uses different peer-feedback mechanisms. Groups post their results and provide feedback to each other on the Rebelbase online platform that has been specifically designed for this course. Global sessions are complemented by local classes.

Besides the typical entrepreneurship and design thinking skills, you thus learn strategies for effective collaboration across geographical, disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Next to your fellow TU/e students, you might find yourself in global teams together with MBA students from Bard college, PhD students from Philippines, bachelor students from Kyrgyzstan, or local entrepreneurs from South Africa. The inclusive set-up of the course provides you with a first hand-experience of what it means to democratize innovation.

As important as the product of your group work in the course is your ability to contribute to and reflect on the process of creating it. The assessment reflects this intended learning objective. The major assessment component focuses on your individual performance when it comes to analyzing complex problems, co-creating knowledge in an equitable way, providing meaningful feedback, or relating the group work to theories of entrepreneurship and social dynamics. You will demonstrate these abilities in an individual portfolio that will include for example an annotated version of your business plan, minutes of group meetings and ‘fishbowls’, and annotated samples of your feedback comments in Rebelbase.

Please note that this is a 10 ECTS course that spans over the first and second quartile. Because this is an cross-institution course, the number of places for TU/e students is limited. If you are interested in following the course, please send your CV and statement of motivation (ca. half a page) to j.n.van.der.straeten@tue.nl.

Intended learning objective

		After attending the course, students will be able to...			**Level of Blooms taxonomy** 								

1. describe the key principles of social entrepreneurship and explain their application to real-world social and environmental challenges.

    	1 - remember								
   

• identify site-specific societal issues and corresponding possibilities and conditions for social enterprise models. 2 - understand
• apply innovative problem-solving techniques to develop and scale solutions that address these site-specific societal issues.
• apply inclusive and equitable knowledge co-creation techniques to collaborate with students and co-instructors across cultural, geographic and disciplinary boundaries, while ensuring alignment with local and global objectives. 3 - apply
• analyze market conditions, value chains, and competitive landscapes to assess the feasibility of social enterprise models. 4 - analyze
• evaluate the effectiveness of proposed solutions by providing constructive peer-level feedback, by gathering and analyzing feedback from users, peers, and mentors, and refining the social enterprise model accordingly.
• reflect critically on the innovation process, documenting insights and learning outcomes in a comprehensive individual portfolio. 5 - evaluate
• create a detailed social enterprise model, including marketing and financial strategies, that demonstrates both social impact and economic viability. 6 - create

Je moet voldoen aan één van de onderstaande verzamelingen met eisen

• Verzameling 1
• Bachelor of Science (BSc) afgerond
• Verzameling 2
• Schakelprogramma afgerond