Social Enterprise Newtork Colloquium Marks Two Years of Progress in Latin America

Social Enterprise Newsletter, Fall 2003

Established in 2001, the Social Enterprise Knowledge Network (SEKN) was formed with the goal of increasing social enterprise intellectual capital through a partnership between Harvard Business School, leading Latin American business schools, and the AVINA foundation. The project emerged from the vision and leadership of HBS professor James E. Austin, chair of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative, and colleagues from several other schools in the region, who together identified the need for management education to address the challenges of the social sector. "We take a global perspective in social enterprise," Austin said at the time. "We believe in the power of comparative cross-country analyses. Social enterprise has a very important role to play in Latin America."

Throughout the colloquium there was a strong sentiment of a mission accomplished, and that the capacity to show quality results has reinforced the position of social enterprise leaders in all participating schools.

To mark the end of the first two-year research cycle, members of SEKN and leading practitioners from the nonprofit and private sectors in Latin America recently gathered at HBS for a colloquium titled, "Partnering for Progress in Latin America." "We wanted to engage our stakeholders, introducing them to our approach to collaborative knowledge generation," says Ezequiel Reficco, an HBS postdoctoral fellow and a key contributor to SEKN. "We also wanted to take stock and distill some important lessons from the previous two years of joint work."

Two years ago, SEKN set ambitious goals of knowledge generation, which included completing a book that summarizes the findings of its research and a set of 24 high-quality teaching cases and teaching notes. Throughout the colloquium, there was a strong sentiment of a mission accomplished, and that the capacity to show quality results has reinforced the position of social enterprise leaders in all participating schools. Austin cites the work of HBS Latin America Research Center (LARC) executive director Gustavo A. Herrero (MBA '76) as being particularly instrumental in helping achieve these goals. "SEKN would not have achieved its high productivity without the leadership of Gustavo and the support of the LARC," he notes.

Feedback from colloquium attendees indicates that the work of SEKN has filled an important void in the region and enriched participating institutions. "The elements that were identified as having the greatest impact on the schools in the first research cycle are precisely those that we consider most valuable in our school: networking, a commitment to our mission, serving our students and centering the learning on them, and teamwork," says Jonathan Coles, president of Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion, newly participating institute. By engaging the leading schools in the Western Hemisphere, SEKN is helping to consolidate and expand the field of social enterprise as an established and internationally respected area of intellectual inquiry.

SEKN was founded on three essential pillars: research, education, and networking. Founding members of SEKN sought to broaden the education of current and future leaders, fostering a mindset that would bring more talent and know-how to work for the betterment of society. All participating institutions consider social enterprise to be integral to their mission and have included materials in their curricula, in MBA and executive education courses. SEKN also aimed to strengthen participating institutions through the development of faculty capacity in research and case development, with an international collaborative network. The primary driver of the network has always been the creation of cutting-edge, practice-based knowledge in social enterprise."Our key goal for the next two two-year research cycles is to again generate important new knowledge based on our field-based comparative research in each of the member countries," says Austin. "We also have the goal of schools into SEKN, and with the addition of schools from Spain we expand beyond the Americas and become an Ibero-American network." He also feels it will be important to significantly strengthen the institutional capacity of each member for research, teaching, and service in the social enterprise arena and to gain international recognition for SEKN as a distinctive and leading knowledge producer in the field. Adds HBS Dean Kim B. Clark, "In the few short years since it was launched, SEKN has accomplished a tremendous amount. The insights that have emerged are integral to the goal of increasing our international research and course development efforts, simultaneously contributing to and drawing from this key region."