Continuing Education & Professional Development
Social Entrepreneurship (Applied to Nutrition, Healthcare and AIDS in Africa)
The basic thesis of this workshop is that many societal problems, if addressed entrepreneurially, create opportunities for business initiatives that generate profits and ameliorate/alleviate the societal problem. This approach simultaneously produces societal wealth and entrepreneurial wealth, and is different from the way the public sector and Nonprofits or NGOs address social problems. In this paradigm, the creation of social wealth is not the by-product of, but the target of the entrepreneurial effort. Participants will be encouraged to address issues of import to them from the vantage point of the model being presented in this workshop, which will be illustrated by the Penn initiatives into nutrition and small-scale agricultural production (Zambia) and HIV/AIDS (South Africa and Botswana).
Date(s): Friday, February 1, 2008 (9:00am–5:00pm)
and Saturday, February 2, 2008 (9:00am–4:00pm)
Location: 3815 Walnut St, Seminar Room B, School of Social Policy & Practice Annex
Instructor(s): James Thompson
James D. Thompson is co-founder and director of the Wharton Societal Wealth Program, a Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs initiative which helps design, seed, or grow entrepreneurial firms that generate revenues while alleviating societal plights. His professional interests include the deployment of entrepreneurship as a means with which to attend to social problems, the development of a method of rapidly identifying appropriate markets for the successful commercialization of technology, and effective means of increasing the “speed-to-market” capabilities of growth-oriented and technology-producing firms. He is a part-time lecturer in the Wharton Management Department and teaches corporate growth and dynamic strategy in Wharton Executive Education. He holds a BCom from the University of South Africa, an MBA from the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and is currently a PhD candidate at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.