Contact: Catherine Walsh, cwalsh@hbs.edu (617) 495-6931
Harvard Business School Communications
BOSTON - More than 200 people, including faculty, students, alumni, and practitioners, came together at Harvard Business School (HBS) on April 7 to mark the tenth anniversary of the Social Enterprise Initiative. Co-founded in 1993 by Professors James E. Austin and V. Kasturi Rangan, SEI generates and shares knowledge that helps individuals and organizations create social value in the nonprofit, private, and public sectors.
Today, social enterprise is an integral part of Harvard Business School’s research agenda and educational mission. Among the achievements of the Social Enterprise Initiative:
- More than 40 faculty are now involved in social enterprise research and teaching at the School.
- Over 300 case studies and notes authored or co-authored by HBS faculty have been published on social enterprise topics, as well as 40 journal articles and 32 Harvard Business Review articles.
- Nearly 10 percent of entering HBS students are now drawn from the nonprofit and public sectors.
- The MBA curriculum offers eight elective courses on social enterprise.
- The HBS Business Plan Contest offers a separate social enterprise trackfor nonprofit and for-profit business plans with explicitly social agendas.
- The HBS Social Enterprise Club is one of the largest student clubs on campus, with over 300 members.
- Over 2,500 leaders have attended social enterprise Executive Education programs at the School.
- The Social Enterprise Knowledge Network, founded at HBS to help business schools in Latin America grapple with social enterprise issues, is now expanding to Europe and Asia.
- The Harvard Graduate School of Education, HBS, and nine urban school districts are working together on a joint venture to dramatically improve the educational outcomes of the schools in these districts, including Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.
The School’s commitment to the principles of social enterprise extends beyond the HBS campus. The Social Enterprise Alumni Association is now the largest non-geographical alumni club, with nearly 700 members. In addition, 81 percent of HBS graduates volunteer in some capacity for nonprofits, and 57 percent serve on nonprofit boards.
At a dinner capping the day’s special events, John C. Whitehead (MBA ’47), former co-chair of Goldman Sachs, Deputy Secretary of State, and current head of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, was honored for the key role he played in launching and supporting the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative. Not only did he propose SEI a decade ago to the School’s dean at the time, John H. McArthur, but he also established the John C. Whitehead Fund for Not-for-Profit Management at HBS in 1995 to provide seed funding and ongoing support for the Social Enterprise Initiative.