Social Enterprise and Intrapreneurship resources launched

Social Enterprise

The social enterprise project was a collaboration project with Vitae, Paul Spencer from the University of the West of England and Paul Toombs.

The resources have proved to be a great way to inspire researchers to consider social enterprise as an outlet for their skills and attributes and to engage them in enterprise activities. One participant commented that "I only had a vague idea of what social enterprise is all about, this inspired me to be more entrepreneurial in a way that is not about big profits for shareholders"

The Common Good: a three-hour development activity

This activity focuses on the identification of and possible solutions to societal and/or environmental problems in a framework that could feasibly be run as a social enterprise.

A manual with facilitator briefs, participant handouts and accompanying PowerPoint slides are available for UK HEIs

Ketso: a two-hour case study in social enterprise

This case study uses a real life example of a social enterprise that was established as a spin-out venture from a UK university. The session focuses on the practical elements concerning the sustainability of social enterprises with a strong focus on creative problem solving. A manual with facilitator briefs and participant handouts can be downloaded by UK HEIs.

Supporting videos

To be used in conjunction with these sessions we have produced some video vignettes of successful social Entrepreneurs covering the following areas:

• What is social enterprise?
• Meet the social entrepreneurs
• Running a successful social enterprise
• Thoughts on social entrepreneurship
• Ketso case study: the beginning
• Ketso case study: ongoing issues
• Ketso case study: using research skills

These videos are also available on DVD.

Intrapreneurship resources

This was a collaborative project with 8 HEIs which has involved us investigating the capabilities and skills displayed by superior performing intrapreneurial early career researchers.

As a result of this project we have created:

• A self assessment form for researchers to focus on their current intrapreneurial capabilities and areas they would like to develop
• An information sheet for researchers on intrapreneurship
• A 75 minute and 3 hour development session for researcher developers to introduce to researchers the concepts of innovation and intrapreneurship in an academic and non-academic context through a series of academic and non-academic scenarios.

These resources have been integrated into a resource manual.

We will also be producing a short report about the project.