Rethinking Impact, Value Creation, and Entrepreneurship

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary seminar reimagines entrepreneurship by placing impact at its center. We begin from the premise that entrepreneurship is not only an economic activity but also a moral, cultural, societal, and political act—one that shapes the world as much as it responds to it. In this course, we explore what it means to design ventures where financial and societal value are neither separate nor parallel goals but are outcomes best embedded within each other in the same model of value creation. This course will ask students to imagine enterprises where financial outcomes are driven by, and dependent upon, societal impacts, rather than competing with them in some sort of zero-sum manner. This course will also examine how ideas about innovation, markets, value, risk, responsibility, and progress circulate across economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, film, and the arts. Students will engage with classic and contemporary thinkers, among others, such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Franklin, Kate Raworth, Peter Drucker, and Muhammad Yunus. They will read these works alongside artistic and literary works by William Blake, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, Jacob Lawrence, Ai Weiwei, and others. Throughout the semester, students will pair these texts with modern impact venture case studies to investigate how markets, institutions, and cultural narratives shape what we understand as “value”—and how entrepreneurs might redefine it.