Social entrepreneurship is pioneering and inspirational. Treating beneficiaries as customers and collaborating with other stakeholders in society - the government, traditional charities and responsible corporations – are pivotal to scale-up new innovations and models that have proved successful to achieve social impact, writes Adjunct Associate Professor Marie ROSENCRANTZ, Department of Management, HKUST Business School. She teaches a course that allows students to experience social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy, and seeks to help build the social impact ecosystem in Hong Kong and beyond.
Despite progress made over the last decades with respect to poverty reduction, notably in China, there are still large unmet social needs and massive efforts required to reach the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More than 700 million people, or ten per cent of the world population, still live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than US$1.90 per day. Hundreds of millions of people lack access to basic necessities like sanitation, safe drinking water, electricity and banking services. Lack of access to services and infrastructure has wider negative implications for health, education and gender equality, as well as the ability of the poor to improve their own lives and lift themselves and their families out of poverty.
While Hong Kong is an affluent global center for finance and commerce, it has a higher income gap between the rich and the poor than most advanced economies. 1.3 million of the 7.2 million people in Hong Kong live in poverty, with a disproportionate number of the poor being elderly and almost twenty per cent children.
To address these pressing social needs, government programs, charitable organizations and responsible corporations all have important roles to play. Alongside more traditional actors, a dynamic movement of social entrepreneurs has emerged, who address social and environmental issues in business-like and innovative ways. Social entrepreneurs often start their ventures driven by a strong personal passion to address a social need. However, to reach scale, social entrepreneurs need the support of others, often including some partly or fully subsidized funding, at least during the early days of their social ventures.
Venture philanthropists, like venture capitalists, extend not only seed funding for social entrepreneurs, but also support social enterprises in other ways, including through their often extensive networks and technical / financial know-how. Government agencies and corporations can learn from and partner with social entrepreneurs, and can help take their work to scale.
Cross-sector collaboration to nurture social minds
Since 2013, HKUST has offered a pioneering MBA-level action-based learning course in Social Entrepreneurship and Venture Philanthropy (SEVP). During the last five years, our course has evolved from an initial partnership between the HKUST Business School and The Yeh Family Philanthropy foundation to also benefit from the support of the HKSAR government’s Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SIE) Development Fund, as well as from many others who join us as guest speakers or support our students in other ways. Our course has subsequently been replicated by two other universities in Hong Kong.
While housed in the HKUST Business School, our SEVP course is interdisciplinary by design. Students who join the MBAs to enroll in our course come from many different disciplines at Master, PhD and Undergraduate levels, representing a diverse group of entrepreneurial and socially minded talent from across the University.
Student consulting work for social impact and philanthropic funding
In class, students learn about local and global best practices in social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy through lectures, case studies and experience sharing by guest speakers. Outside of class, students work in teams to apply their learnings through consulting projects to help innovative social purpose organizations scale-up their work to address pressing social issues in Hong Kong.
There are no exams or tests. Instead, student teams prepare funding proposals and scale-up plans, and pitch on behalf of their social venture partners during a Funding Committee meeting at the end of the course for HK$250,000 in grant funding, which is generously donated each semester by The Yeh Family Philanthropy. Students vote alongside senior professionals to decide which of the social venture partners that will win the grant. In this way, students gain real-life experiences working as consultants to advance social causes, and also get to try the role of a philanthropic funder.
Since our course launched, more than 40 different social purpose organizations have worked with our students to help scale-up their work in a range of different areas, including some of the most pressing social issues facing Hong Kong such as care for the elderly, integration of ethnic minority populations and persons with disabilities, housing shortage, youth-at-risk and quality education for less-privileged children. To-date, The Yeh Family Philanthropy has donated HK$2.5 million to ten different social venture partners that worked with our students.
Examples of the social purpose organizations which have worked with HKUST students through the SEVP course
Social impact during the last academic year
In autumn 2018, the social enterprise Active Global won the HK$250,000 grant thanks to the work of their student team. Active Global addresses the shortage of affordable home services for the elderly, an acute problem given Hong Kong’s rapidly aging population. Inspired by a Dutch service provider, the student team developed a new cross-subsidy model for Active Global to offer affordable help from professional nurses, supported by less expensive helpers, to both affluent and lower-income elderly. The HK$250,000 grant enables Active Global to pioneer this new model of elderly services in Hong Kong.
Steven Chiu, Director, Active Global, and course instructor Professor Marie Rosencrantz celebrate the grant award with the student team
Other social venture partners in autumn 2018 included FoodCo, a technology platform which links food donors with charities that help the poor; Teach Unlimited Foundation, which provides mentors for students in disadvantaged schools; and Elite Boxing, offering fitness training for youth empowerment.
WEDO Global secured the grant in spring of 2019, also in tough competition with other worthy social venture partners working with different student teams. WEDO Global works to promote better integration between ethnic minority groups and the majority Chinese population in Hong Kong. Cultural differences are often perceived negatively. Many ethnic minority children grow up at a disadvantage due to lack of assimilation, stereotyping and language abilities. The student team helped WEDO Global develop a plan to scale-up their work with schools and young ethnic minority ambassadors to foster cross-community interaction and learning.
The student team, course instructor and teaching assistant with the “big check” for WEDO Global from The Yeh Family Philanthropy
Other social venture partners which worked with our students last semester included Automation for Humanity and its elderly-friendly device Sit and Shower; Bright Services, which helps former offenders regain dignity and get jobs; and Ednovators, a movement to promote innovation in education.
Also during the last academic year, Foodlink, the foodbank which won the course grant in autumn 2017, was able to open its new community kitchen in Kowloon as a result of their student team’s project work. Foodlink brings leftover food from restaurants, hotels and other donors to distribution centers for those in need.
Building a community for social impact
As we have gained more experience and contacts over the years of running the SEVP course, we have been able to initiate new partnerships and collaborations. Our students helped connect Active Global with Longevity Design House, another previous course grant winner, which helps make seniors’ homes safer for them as they age and their needs evolve. Twopresents, an online invitation and charitable giving platform, won the course grant in spring 2015, and used the funding to extend its market reach and improve its web-platform to raise millions of HKD for charities.
Since 2017, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse volunteers have supported our course by offering pitch-practice sessions for student teams before the Funding Committee meetings. Our students also enjoy learning from industry professionals who join class sessions as guest speakers, including social entrepreneurs as well as representatives from funders like JPMorgan Global Philanthropy, EMpower and the UBS Optimus Foundations, the development finance institutions IFC and AsDB, incubators/accelerators like SOWAsia, and many others.
The partnership between our course and Ashoka, a leading global support network for social entrepreneurs, goes both ways. Ashoka Director Mark CHENG is a regular course guest speaker and has invited our alumni to help him with due diligence on Ashoka fellow candidates. We also collaborated for the nomination and vetting of some of the first Ashoka fellows in Hong Kong.
Course alumni often continue to support the social venture partner organizations they worked with as volunteers or staff. Former students took the initiative to organize an alumni organization, which has almost 200 members. Our alumni organization shares information about jobs and volunteer opportunities, relevant events and resources for former students to continue to engage for social impact. This semester, we are pioneering a new student-initiated initiative, whereby ten course alumni volunteer to mentor our new students for their project work.
Several of our course alumni have started their own social ventures. The social enterprise Level Up, which provides affordable hearing-aid screening, was co-founded by MBA graduate and course alumnus Marion DURIEZ, and has subsequently been incubated by SOWAsia. Another course alumnus, Jan-Justus SCHMIDT, founded BluGreen/Enapter in Hong Kong to decarbonize the energy sector by making renewable hydrogen gas more cost-effective than fossil fuels.
Course alumni who chose to pursue corporate jobs after graduation have also found ways to contribute to help us “build the ecosystem” to support social enterprises in Hong Kong. Alessandro CALO, an MPhil student, won the HKUST One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition in 2016, the semester after taking our course, for an invention which makes solar panels more efficient. After graduation, Alex took a job with KPMG and has helped to organize a pro-bono consulting collaboration between KPMG and course alumni students and social venture partners.
As Linus LAUSEN, a student from the spring 2019 semester put it: “This course is not just about learning. We are actually helping to build the social impact ecosystem in Hong Kong – and beyond!”
This autumn, our students will work with the social venture partners BNet Tech to help launch a new smart walking stick for the elderly; Inclusive Impact to scale-up its workshops with para-athletes; Child Development Centre, helping children with special education needs; Impact HK, which supports the homeless; and KELY, empowering young people to reach their full potential. Stay tuned to learn who will win the next HK$250,000 grant!
To learn more about the course, please visit www.nsm.hk