Organizations and World Change


Complex problems challenge your generation. Some persist from prior generations, and others have recently emerged or intensified from rapid social, environmental, technological, economic, and geopolitical changes. The exact solutions to these problems may be uncertain, but they will certainly require ingenuity and innovation – as well as multipronged approaches from diverse perspectives. In this course, students will learn how to leverage different organizational forms for social innovation and world change. Students will engage in discovery learning to identify and understand specific social, economic, political, environmental, or public problems and potential solutions. Students will choose a problem to focus on and identify existing nonprofit, for-profit, and government programs that are currently approaching that problem. Students will develop case studies of existing organizations and learn the legal process to start a new nonprofit or for-profit organization to address the problem. Through the final project, students will use knowledge gained from the course to develop a business plan for a new nonprofit or for-profit organization to help solve the complex problem they focused on through the course.