Spring 2012 Director’s Letter

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Spring is here and it’s not just time to plant your garden (although that is an admirable thing to do!). It is that time of year when the University of Maryland students exude a sense of new beginnings as they prepare for graduation and opportunity seems to blossom just like nature around us.

This semester, the Center for Social Value Creation and our university partners have given students many opportunities to get their hand a little dirty – to learn how to apply entrepreneurial principles and innovation to the social and environmental issues they care most deeply about.

Some mentionable highlights include:

The Social Enterprise Symposium– Attended by 1,200 students with nearly 50 guest speakers and 22 sessions presented stories of how entrepreneurs, business leaders, nonprofit executives and public servants are creating sustainable social change and gave students new skills to use in their careers.

The Do Good Challenge – Led by the School of Public Policy, Network for Good, and Kevin Bacon’s Sixdegrees.org, nearly 100 student teams competed to create as much good for a cause of their choice in just 6 weeks.

Social Entrepreneurship Business Pitch Competition – Since Fall, student entrepreneurs have been pitching socially-minded business ideas to entrepreneurs-in-residence— ideas with positive impact beyond profit maximization and providing jobs. Five finalists presented their business ideas to a panel of expert social entrepreneurship judges to win $1250 of seed funding, co-sponsored by the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship.

ACC Clean Energy Challenge – Brought to UMD by Mtech at the Clark School of Engineering and funded by the Department of Energy, the $100K ACC Clean Energy Challenge is a new business plan competition encouraging students from all universities throughout the southeastern United States to develop business plans for new clean energy companies focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency improvements and advanced fuels/vehicles.

As I reflect on these many events and competitions, I am motivated by the enthusiasm of our students to participate and the aptitude of our faculty and staff to run them exceptionally well. But I am also left to wonder if there is more to be done…. for it seems as if we might be stopping short of our students’ full potential, leaving unrealized opportunity on the table and ceding too much to chance.

Yes, we need to build student awareness of social problems around them;

Yes, we need to provide opportunities for students to become in engaged in their community;

Yes, we need to frame the importance of giving back;

Yes, we need to create experiences that give rise to moments of obligation, and

Yes, we need to teach students the process of venture creation through business planning.

Its Joseph Schumpeter’s view of the entrepreneur in the Theory of Economic Development that defines the entrepreneur as an agent of change responsible for creative destruction that has defined much of our economic progress in the last century. Is it possible that this same kind of “creative destruction” thinking is the right strategy for addresses a world full of increasingly complex challenges? There are simply not enough philanthropic dollars or government subsidies or incremental improvements to existing products and services to create truly sustained social change. At CSVC, we are continually working to this end in how we teach social value creation in the classroom and build experiences outside of the classroom.

We welcome new ideas and fresh perspective from our CSVC community. And so, let’s not just get our hands a little dirty but, at the end of the day, let’s “smell like dirt” in creating new norms for the change that we want to see in the world!

Best,

Melissa Carrier