Communication, Advocacy, and Entrepreneurship

Catalog description

Communication, Advocacy, and Entrepreneurship empowers students to utilize the process of entrepreneurship as a form of advocacy to enhance the human condition and improve public life. Students in this course learn the "Lean Startup" methodology of entrepreneurship through the simulated team-based activity of launching a startup to address an important societal exigence. Student startup teams will interrogate the rhetorical constructs that enable and constrain advocacy-based solutions to exigencies such as economic inequality, mental health, racism and sexism, and political disenfranchisement, and utilize qualitative research methods to develop key social venture hypotheses around their own simulated startups that will be tested through a minimum of 30 ¿client discovery¿ interviews and secondary research. This course offers a critique of the business paradigm of ¿maximize shareholder value,¿ which privileges rapid scalability and growth, maximized profit, and ROI (Return on Investment), and invites students to consider the impact this dominant view of business has on companies¿ commitment to environmental performance, social responsibility, employee well-being, and organizational mission. Students are encouraged to adopt the ethical business framework of nonprofits and emerging alternatives such as B Corporations and social enterprises, which provide assessments to help companies raise their standards for legal transparency, environmental responsibility, and worker and community well-being. Student simulated startups are designed to give voice to those disenfranchised by systems and discourses of power, and student teams are encouraged to see their solutions as offering services and/or interpretive frameworks that remedy inequity and promote healing, justice, and empowerment within the constraints of a specific moment in time. For example, students concerned about the impact of substance abuse on mental well-being and academic success could create a startup to help colleges/universities alter their messaging about alcohol use and/or implement sober living option best practices, or a student victimized by developmental sexual trauma could draw upon the latest research on healing and the body to propose a startup to raise awareness about natural treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder. Students who complete Communication, Advocacy, and Entrepreneurship are encouraged to consider advancing their idea from simulated startup to real startup by participating in the vast array of educational and fundraising opportunities within Penn State¿s entrepreneurship ecosystem (e.g., Happy Valley Launchbox, Invent Penn State, Startup Week, Global Entrepreneurship Week).