Social Enterprise and Innovation Focus

Program Description

The Social Enterprise and Innovation (SEI) focus provides students with a pathway to study how purpose-driven enterprises can develop innovative solutions to social and environmental problems.

The SEI curriculum examines the diversity of economic activity taking place within capitalism, while highlighting enterprises and innovations that promote social values like democratic governance, equality, and sustainability. Students will envision how existing public policies, technologies, business models, and government institutions might be reconfigured to address the emergent and longstanding problems facing our global community.

Students pursuing the SEI focus study social and alternative enterprises, the digital economy, transnational corporations, supply chains, financial institutions, and the non-profit sector. All students develop a draft business plan for a new social enterprise and take a course in accounting.

Students may take elective cross-registered courses in business, management, entrepreneurship, and marketing through Antioch College’s SOCHE partner schools to further advance their business knowledge and skills.

The SEI focus includes a cooperative education experience that gives students the opportunity to work for enterprises and organizations with social missions. Through Antioch College’s trademark combination of classroom and experiential learning, students completing this focus will be positioned to start their own social enterprise or becomes innovators in the worlds of business and government upon graduation.

Program Goals and Learning Outcomes

Analyze the operations and impacts of social and alternative enterprises in political-economic, social, historical, and anthropological contexts

Study and envision innovations in the fields of enterprise, technology, markets, governance, and public policy which address emergent and longstanding social and environmental problems

Examine the agents, structures, and processes that make up capitalist market economies using a range of analytic tools and concepts

Obtain foundational business planning and accounting skills for social enterprise

Obtain further business knowledge and skills through SOCHE cross-registered courses in business, management, marketing, and entrepreneurship

Gain real-world experience in an enterprise or organization with a social mission through Antioch College’s cooperative education program