ENV 974a/GLBL (Tentative) () (Tentative) / 2025-2026

Social Innovation Starter

Credits: 3 Fall 2025: Time and location TBA

Social Innovation Starter is a new course based at Jackson School of Global Affairs. Students apply the ten stage framework of the textbook “Social Entrepreneurship: Building Impact Step by Step” to innovate new solutions for host organizations. Host organizations are social enterprises or other social purpose organizations based globally and locally who present Yale students with a problem statement to work on over the course of one semester. This could include creating new programs or products, reaching new populations, measuring the impact of existing work, creating new communications tools for existing work, or other challenges. Students gain social innovation and entrepreneurship experience and host organizations benefit from students’ problem solving.  Students from all programs and concentrations at Yale are welcome to join Jackson students in forming inter-disciplinary teams to tackle social challenges.
 
This course runs during the same time as Social Entrepreneurship Lab. The key distinction is that in the former, students pick their own topic to research and ideate on; whereas in this course students work on projects for host organizations. Jackson students may elect to follow up on this course with a summer internship to the host organization, to help support implementation of their solution, if the host organization and the School administration accepts their application