AMBA's Ambition magazine: Issue 59, December 22/January 2023

91% of graduates surveyed said they wanted to work for a company that made a difference to people’s lives

and create a pitch for their solution. The Lake District is a more rural area than the urban Manchester they are used to, and the students have identified many different issues to the urban environment, including loneliness of the elderly population, water management, lack of transport, food waste from hotels, energy and brain drain of educated people to cities – and have come up with innovative solutions to these issues. Entrepreneurship lecturers have benefited from the recent guidance contained within the European Commission’s European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework, known as EntreComp, as well as from 2018’s Quality Assurance Agency document on Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education in the UK. The latter suggests that students should be able to “identify and respond to opportunities using their ideas, knowledge, skills and confidence to create interventions that will address the challenges they meet”, and that learning by doing wherever possible is the most effective pedagogy. What support is available? Mentoring and support can be crucial in helping students to take their business forward. Here, it is particularly effective to bring back alumni social entrepreneurs who have local knowledge and this can be especially useful for social enterprises which often act in a complex ecosystem of businesses and local council and government support. Networking can also help student social entrepreneurs to investigate local and national networks that support social enterprise, for example Social Enterprise UK. When it comes to networking, getting out of the university and into local networking events and organisations is of great value. Raising money is a difficulty for any business, especially for those whose aim is not purely to provide a financial return for its investors. However, students looking to raise funding for a social enterprise can try crowdfunding (for which donation and reward models are the most suitable as there is no commitment to offering investors a financial return) and grants such as UnLtd, National Lottery Community Fund, BBC Children in Need and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, as well as grants at a more local level.

staff in a social enterprise should be paid less, but this can be a false economy as you might use good wages to attract better staff which might in turn improve the impact of your social enterprise. The different types of legal structures available when setting up a social enterprise may also require advice. It also helps if students are given access to a broad network when scaling up, which can be tough to do and is complicated by the fact that different areas of the world – and even within individual countries – are very different in terms of how problems are managed by local authorities and are likely to have a different landscape of help already on offer. entrepreneurship at university or business school as part of the curriculum, from introductory modules to master’s programmes where you have the chance to start your business for real. However, social enterprise can often be an add-on to these entrepreneurship units, something that belies both its complexity and aims. Other initiatives are aimed at increasing awareness of social responsibility in general. Harvard Business School, for example, has now made it compulsory for their MBA students to study carbon accounting as part of the programme. Pedagogic research shows that extracurricular activities can often be the best place for students to develop social Teaching social enterprise There is increasing opportunity for students to study entrepreneurship skills as extracurricular courses are free from the restrictions of, and need for, assessment. They can therefore place a greater focus on being bolder, more practical and learning by doing. For these reasons, it is becoming more common for students to have the opportunity to intern in a social enterprise rather than a traditional large corporate. I have found, in my personal experience, that this kind of learning by experience works well. For several years at the University of Manchester, I have run a social enterprise course for postgraduate students in the Lake District area of the UK, with the aim of identifying opportunities for social enterprises. Groups of students from different subject areas have four days to identify a problem

42 | Ambition | DECEMBER 2022/JANUARY 2023

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