State of Social Entrepreneurship Learning : Ashoka

Since 1980, Ashoka has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, helping more than 1,500 leading social entrepreneurs – know as Ashoka Fellows – to get started, collaborate and succeed. Together with these social entrepreneurs, we develop new approaches for effective collaboration and design the systems and supports needed for the field of social entrepreneurship to thrive. This report summarizes the findings of our investigation into the current state of one of the most critical supports needed for the field – high quality learning opportunities in universities globally.

We are able to report that social entrepreneurship is a rapidly expanding area of study, and in the following pages provide an overview of formalized learning in the form of academic curricula, clubs, professional organizations and competitions. The wide variety of formalized learning structures supporting social entrepreneurship is encouraging to the development of the field, and presents a host of exciting opportunities for budding social entrepreneurs.

This report identifies categories and types of learning activities. In defining these categories and types, we evaluated as many individual examples as possible. Most of these examples were culled from the most developed programs on social entrepreneurship, on the basis that such programs often point the way to the wider development of the field within universities. Many example learning activities are thus listed in the Individual Program Review section of this report and others are mentioned throughout the report as appropriate. We recognize that this collection of examples does not represent an exhaustive scan of all learning activities in social entrepreneurship, and welcome information regarding other new or existing exemplary learning activities.