Final Project Series: Case Western's Social Entrepreneurship Course

Are you interested in potentially starting a business that both makes money and has an impact in the world? Do you ever wonder what tools and techniques help innovators reduce their risk of failure and enable growth? Perhaps you’re curious about the challenges they face while they explore new business models? If you’re a high school student seeking business college prep courses that make a difference, like social entrepreneurship, then the course in social entrepreneurship from Case Western Reserve University’s Pre-College Program is a great fit for you. 

Specifically, this course will teach you: 

• What social entrepreneurship is 
• How to identify your audience
• How to determine specific pain points 
• What it means to be a creative problem solver 
• How to build your hypothetical team, and prepare for the future 

This course also provides you with the proper framework (called a value proposition matrix), to teach you how to examine a startup organization and learn about its customers, problems, solutions, and teams. You will also discover how all these factors work together when you launch a company.

When learning about entrepreneurship, it is critically important to team up with successful entrepreneurs to find out what goes into starting a company. That’s why in this course you’ll hear from four social entrepreneurial business owners to discover what they went through when they were starting their own companies. 

By the end of this course, you will have a complete view of the work needed to build a social venture, giving you a head start to possibly launch your own someday.

Best yet, you’ll have the chance to demonstrate all you’ve learned in an end-of-course Final Project. In this Final Project, you will select a social enterprise of your choice to demonstrate your understanding of the value proposition matrix, as well as the concept of social entrepreneurship and how social impact plays a part in the organization.

Throughout the social entrepreneurship course, you will conduct interviews/research to create your final project. At the end, you will submit a video presentation detailing your findings on the social business of your choice using the value proposition matrix questions. Some of these questions include:

Customer

• Who is the company's target customer?
• Who was their first customer?
• How did they determine who their customer was?
  

Problem

• What is the problem?
• What inspired them to want to solve that problem?
  

Solution

• What is the solution that your social business has created?
• Is it a product or service?
• How are they solving the problem identified?
  

Team

• Who is the entrepreneur?
• What inspired them to start the organization?
• What assets/skills do they have that made them uniquely qualified to create their business?
  

The best part of this project? You will get to include it in your college applications as a demonstration of the great work you put into the course. 

Launching a successful startup is difficult work. This course — including the final project — is ideal for future business majors, budding entrepreneurs, those seeking entrepreneurship classes in high school, those seeking careers that make a difference, and just about anyone with a social conscience.

Visit case.precollegeprograms.org to learn more.