At LAB, in the iSEE – Innovating Social entrepreneurship education -project (LAB 2022) we organized a seminar for sharing experiences about developing aligned social entrepreneurship education and topical issues related to social enterprises.
The seminar took place in September 2022 on Lahti campus, bringing together some researchers, educators, social entrepreneurs, and students in the field. The participants, 25 people, came from six countries.
Seminar topics
The seminar covered a range of themes. We heard expert presentations from both research and entrepreneur points of view. The representative of ARVO – the Finnish Association of Social Enterprises – informed the audience not only about the association and its activities but also about the aims and activities of the new competence center of social enterprises in Finland.
We also shared some project experiences: takeaways from the collecting data phase as well as experimenting education. The presentations gave insights into the ecosystems of social enterprises. The Latvian partner shared some knowledge collected from Cambridge, where the ecosystem is very developed. Another presentation focused on the Estonian ecosystem of social enterprises which also has unique aspects and showed how social enterprises are part of their operational environment.
Takeaways from experimenting with social entrepreneurship education were summarized in three presentations. One highlighted the business side of social enterprises: they also need to be financially viable. Another presentation described the backstage of developing education: it has been an enlightening experience for all of us, creating learning objectives and aligning contents, methods, and the practicalities and the institutional, curricula side.
Fortunately, we also had a student sharing his experiences from participating in an aligned course organized by four partner institutions. At the end of the day, the student´s experiences are the most important measurement of the project´s success, too.
Toward new future projects
One of the presentations that provoked the most discussion among participants was a presentation by a mission-driven entrepreneur and their ownership model. Their enterprise also decided to apply a stewardship ownership model to ensure the company’s mission-driven nature in the future.
The project has achieved all its aims and will come to an end but exploring the project process has stimulated many new areas where new collaboration projects could be explored. The ends are new beginnings. We were very happy with the participation of each presenter and participant in our small-scale but fruitful seminar – all of you pave the way for new ideas on the topic.
Authors
Heidi Myyryläinen works as a RDI Specialist at Business Unit at LAB University of Applied Sciences.
Anna Pajari works as a Senior Lecturer at Business Unit at LAB University of Applied Sciences.
References
LAB. 2022. LAB University of Applied Sciences. iSEE. Innovating social entrepreneurship education. Project. Cited 21 Oct 2022. Available at https://www.lab.fi/fi/projekti/isee-innovating-social-entrepreneurship-education
