Efforts to establish social entrepreneurship as a legitimate part of the core curriculum offered by business schools worldwide have taken another step forward, following the first International Social Entrepreneurship Research Conference, which was held at IESE Business School, Barcelona, April 22-24, 2005 and organized by IESE Professor Johanna Mair, Jeffrey Robinson of NYU Stern and Kai Hockerts of INSEAD.

The three-day event was jointly sponsored by IESE's Anselmo Rubiralta Center for Globalization and Strategy, New York University's Stern School of Business and Insead. More than 60 academics and researchers from a dozen countries gathered to exchange ideas on designing and delivering courses on social entrepreneurship. They represented some of the world's top business schools - from Harvard in the U.S. to Cambridge and Oxford in the U.K. -  and they came from as far away as Israel and the Philippines.

"As academics and researchers, we need to demonstrate - with the same intellectual and analytical rigor that one would apply to, say, marketing a consumer product - that social entrepreneurship is an important phenomenon worth pursuing, and that it deserves a legitimate place in the MBA program," said Harvard Prof. James Austin, who facilitated the opening session to draw out the collective experiences and insights of the workshop participants.

Many participants shared the institutional challenges they faced trying to convince the powers that be to try something new. Some shared how their entrepreneurship departments failed to see what was distinctive about "social" entrepreneurship (as if traditional, commercial entrepreneurship had no "social" dimension). Another said his dean considered the subject a distraction from the core courses on finance, marketing and strategy, which are designed to prepare students to make money in the corporate sector, which some would argue is what business schools are ultimately about.

Harvard's James Austin reminded the conference that social entrepreneurship was "like launching a new product in a crowded marketplace, so one needn't be too frustrated if the initial market response is weak." He pointed out that there are other indicators of interest, beyond the number of courses offered or the number of takers on each course.

IESE's Christian Seelos noted that the wide variety of experiences of all the participants "shows just how vast and rich the social entrepreneurship phenomenon really is."
 
Austin admitted there were formidable challenges ahead "to take a new field and insert it into old institutions. But I also see a tremendously rich set of opportunities to add value to our schools and to reach other students. Let us go forth and research and teach!"