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• Rising junior or senior class standing
• GPA (minimum 2.7 gpa for eligibility)
• Application and essays

Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid - EB 107 S
Description: How do we alleviate poverty? It’s a question that drives leaders, governments, NGOs, and businesses all over the world. A better question, though, might be how do we empower traditionally under resourced populations to overcome poverty and live healthy, sustainable lives?  This is a redemptive entrepreneurship question. Increasingly, entrepreneurs and business leaders in the private and public sectors are employing innovation, startup development, and impact investing as responses to the challenge of poverty, paving the way for better outcomes amongst these populations.
The goal of the course will be to identify the principal challenges and opportunities in serving the lowest-income markets at the bottom of the pyramid and the key factors that lead to business success or failure.

Through site visits, guest lectures, and regular service-learning time, students will gain greater understanding of some of the populations traditionally at the “bottom” of the socioeconomic pyramid - refugees, the unhoused, and the formerly incarcerated, amongst others. These experiences will prompt students to reflect on the complex issue of poverty at the intersection of business, systems-thinking, and faith.  By taking full advantage of the course offerings, students will walk away with experiential knowledge of how funding sources, business entities, nonprofit leaders, and local governments work together to create conditions for human flourishing, especially amongst “the least of these”.

The course is aimed at future managers, entrepreneurs, non-profit advocates and investment professionals who are interested in addressing the needs of society’s most vulnerable populations. The course seeks to provide an understanding of  how astute and novel business approaches can be created to address and perhaps reverse cycles and systems of poverty amongst under-resourced populations within a global urban center and, in-so-doing, ignite an entrepreneurial imagination for the contexts to which students will return.

Social Entrepreneurship and Community Action - EB 183
Description: Why should we engage in social change? What is a social innovation and how can social responsibility be profitable? What distinguishes successful social ventures? What do innovation and creativity have to do with self-awareness and faith?

This course will shed light on such questions as we consider a range of methods to understand and attend to pressing social problems through the lens of entrepreneurship and innovation. We will examine ourselves as changemakers alongside local, specific, solutions-oriented social change efforts in the heart of London.

This course fuses Biblical principles with marketplace application to help students discover and apply their intelligence, energy, and passion towards identifying and confronting social problems. Students get a foundation in design thinking, stakeholder engagement, and entrepreneurship theories while hearing from practitioners living out these principles within the local church, marketplace, and public sector in London. The course follows social innovation trends across four key sectors: private sector, the church, public sector, and non-profit. We will commence with a full day hack-a-thon with The London School of Economics  where students work together in groups on a relevant social problem, inspiring each other in the design and development of a proposed solution. The understanding, tools, and perspectives they gain through participation in the course will contribute to their success in building and scaling their own enterprise, consulting social ventures, or leading innovative business projects and spinoffs in the public and/or private sectors.

$10,000, not including airfare