Join @ashokau from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) to participate in a Twitter-based discussion with other innovators and an expert in the field, Michael Horn, cofounder and executive director of the education practice of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. He is also the author of several publications and articles, including the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

This is your chance to make your voice heard about disruptive innovations in Higher Education and to ask Michael Horn your most burning questions.

What is a #SocEntChat and how does it work?

A #SocEntChat is a real-time, Twitter-based discussion about social entrepreneurship that focuses on specific issues, areas, themes, and events. It is designed for current and aspiring social entrepreneurs, funders, journalists, and supporters to share ideas, discuss the state of the field, identify the latest innovations, and pinpoint areas requiring deeper exploration.

Joining the conversation is easy. Just log-in to Twitter at 4 p.m. on February 7th, 2012.

Then:

• Use the #SocEntChat hashtag to make your comments visible in the stream. Use search.twitter.com or an application like Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com) or thwirl (www.thwirl.com) to follow the #SocEntChat hashtag and keep up with the conversation.
• Introduce yourself and take a minute to get to know the other chatters when you join.
• Send your questions to @ashokau without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) so they can be considered for this conversation.

Please remember to use the #SocEntChat hashtag, stay on topic, be respectful, and have fun! And be sure to invite your friends and followers to join the discussion, too; the best way is to post a tweet like this one:

Join @ashokau on Feb 7th at 4pm EST for a #SocEntChat about Disruptive Innovation in Higher Ed. Spread the word & save the date! #highered

Catch you on Twitter!

Lynn Price, of Denver, Colorado, is an Ashoka Fellow, author of the book Vision For A Change: A Social Entrepreneur’s Insights From The Heart, and founder of Camp To Belong, an international non-profit organization that works to reunite siblings who live in separate foster, adoptive or kinship homes through their Summer Camp Programs.

For Lynn Price, disruptive innovation is a way of being, woven deeply into her work and personal story. You might say that Price’s whole life has been a series of disruptions, which she has courageously and creatively turned into remarkable innovations.

When Price was eight years old, her parents revealed that they were not her biological mother and father. Price was just an infant when her birth father abandoned the family. Her mother, unable to cope with this loss, was institutionalized. Price also learned that she had an older sister who had been placed into foster care with a different family.

This traumatic disruption could have derailed Price for life. Instead it served as a launch pad for innovation.

Price completed her degree at the University of Illinois and went on to have a successful business career in communications. In 1994, Price sold her business in order to be the mother she never quite had to her three young children.

She also stayed involved with the foster care system, serving as a foster mother to several children, and volunteering as Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for foster children. While Price reconnected with her sister in high school and remains close with her today, her personal experience as a foster child separated from her sister gave her the awareness to recognize that change was needed in the way the foster care and adoption systems handled siblings.

Rather than waiting for the system to change, Price created the change she wanted to see by establishing Camp To Belong in 1995. Camp To Belong reunites siblings who live in different homes to create fun memories and emotional empowerment among other youth in the same situations. Since then, Camp To Belong Summer Camp Programs have sprung up across the United States and Australia.

As an Ashoka Fellow, Price has written numerous books, is a professional speaker (mostly on the topic of social innovation) and has worked closely with universities across the country. She will attend the Ashoka U Exchange, where she hopes to share this a message with the higher education community, particularly the students: “YOU, with a capital Y-O-U, can be the catalyst for change.”

“Change is having a profound impact,” Price said. “Like [Ashoka founder Bill] Drayton says, it’s revolutionizing an industry. Change could be starting with something very small, like just bringing awareness to issues people just don’t think about.”

For example, people frequently comment to Price that they never considered the fact that siblings in foster care are separated. ‘They’ll say, I know they are separated from their parents, but I had no idea [about siblings]. I just never thought about it!”

Price calls this awareness the Power of the Ripple. “It starts small then turns into a tidal wave.” When the tidal wave hits, legislation, processes, and policies are profoundly impacted.

When it comes to disruptive innovation in higher education, Price feels that we need to integrate the mindset of a social entrepreneur into the culture of academia.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that truly anything is possible,” Price said. “As a social entrepreneur, you are a giant risk-taker. Sometimes you have to bend the rules to make things happen and that’s the mindset we need at the university level.”

Another thing universities can learn from social entrepreneurs is to have an unselfish, no-ego approach to sharing ideas, she said. In higher education, the culture should be that everyone’s idea is a good one—so say it and share it, find the best of what you do, and then proceed as a unified front.

Price observes that as students graduate from college today, they care deeply about the world. They are making educational and professional decisions, which meld a passion to change the world with business and career plans; they define wealth as a better world, and they don’t necessarily see big paychecks as the only conduit to fulfillment.

Knowing this, Price says universities need to empower students to recognize what they already know and can contribute even before graduation. A transformative university experience should empower students to believe they can get started and put their ideas into action now, rather than getting stuck thinking that gaining the “experience” needed to have any real impact on the world begins the day they walk across the commencement stage.

In the keynotes she gives around the country, called Vision for a Change, Price often finds people feeling stuck because “you get into business, you have to write the strategic plan, and spend months on budgets, make the flow charts, etc.” It’s at this point that she encourages people to go out and put their ideas into action.

“Just do it!” she says. “Then make it look pretty.”

Another paralyzing trap is feeling like you have to predict an exact outcome, Price said. “You don’t have to know what your goal is for five years from now; you don’t have to have an exact outcome planned out. If you have the vision, go with it and see what happens!” Price’s own story is a great example of this kind of calculated risk-taking that grew from trusting what she already knew.

The same approach—of testing out new models, even without all the facts—is needed in higher education. “We need to say to students, ‘Go on! Bust out! And don’t feel like you don’t know anything!” Price said. “Let them pave their own track record, not have to wait to get it after graduation. Mix gut in the process. Take risks. Have respect for people with experience, but let objectivity and naivety broaden the horizons. Encourage collaboration; no ego, and unselfish commiseration.”

With this kind of disruption, Price believes universities can truly transform the educational experience into a world changing experience.

Learn more about Price and her work in her book, Vision For A Change: A Social Entrepreneur’s Insights From The Heart, or visit http://www.lynnprice.com/

This is the third in a series of posts featuring Ashoka U Exchange participants discussing “Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education.” This week we feature Jane Turner and Benhür Oral faculty members from Özyeğin Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Turkey.

If you think social entrepreneurship has to be taught as a stand-alone subject, you haven’t met Jane Turner and Benhür Oral. While teaching English as a preparatory subject in Istanbul’s Özyeğin University, they quickly realized they could incorporate far more into the syllabus than just the basic language knowledge set.

By rethinking the way English is taught, Turner and Oral prepare students to think about and address problems in their backyard. At Özyeğin, English is not just an academic exercise – it’s meaningful and tangible. By focusing on business ethics, sustainability and social entrepreneurship in the classroom, students learn academic skills such as writing, speaking, presenting, and persuading, all while problem-solving their way through local and regional issues.

Since its very inception, Özyeğin University has valued entrepreneurship and civic engagement at its core. Having welcomed its first students in fall 2008, the university itself is a startup, which means the university organizes around creative problem solving.

When Turner and Oral were brought in to formulate the English curriculum, they turned to Ashoka Turkey and Fellow Muhammad Yunus for assistance. “We’re English teachers, first and foremost, but it has been interesting to actually have a chance to get involved in something different, serve the university’s needs and mission, learn about all these different areas,” Turner said.

The growth of the program demonstrates their success. Their first cohort was composed of only 17 students, but the program has grown to 600 within just four years, and is set to double in the next year. “We have started something that people are really excited about,” Oral said.

As you can imagine, one of the challenges Turner and Oral face is growing the program while maintaining its essential components, infusing the culture of volunteerism and social entrepreneurship. Even though the concept is experimental, it’s working.

“In Turkish culture, helping each other is the sense of community, it’s not something you would do on an organized basis,” Turner said. It’s easy to loose that sense of interconnectedness in any large metropolitan city, yet Turner and Oral are finding that engaging those values in the classroom is beneficial to the rate of learning.

Even more encouraging, many students want to continue those very volunteer activities, or others, when they finish the course. While cautioning that it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, Turner added that her students have truly enjoyed making contacts and going out in the field to explore social issues.

Turner and Oral praised their university for being fully committed to the coursework, and said they are thankful to have institutional backing, which allows them to focus their efforts on strengthening the programs. They regret not being able to bring the rest of their team to the Ashoka Exchange, but are very excited to meet their peers from around the world.

Turner is particularly interested in how others “bring their curriculum alive” while Oral is looking forward to the international partnerships that can be formed at the Ashoka Exchange: “Actually being there and meeting people who have been doing this for some time is the real attraction—and to bring some of that excitement over to our part of the world.”

The outlook for the region is positive, as demonstrated by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Istanbul in December, where he attended the Second Global Summit on Entrepreneurship. There seems to be an undercurrent developing across Turkey, with Istanbul becoming a hub of innovation.

As our interview came to an end in the city that spans the continents of Asia and Europe, Turner added that “Turkey has such a young population, and there is so much potential.”

“We feel like we are in the forefront of this, and that we are no longer just English teachers; English is just the medium,” Oral concluded.

This is the second in a series of posts featuring Ashoka U Exchange participants discussing “Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education.” This week we feature Stacey Williams, Graduate Student, M.A. Higher Education Leadership in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences (SOLES) at the University of San Diego (USD).

When asked about her personal definition of disruptive innovation, Stacey Williams, a first-year master’s student in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego, remarked: “Disruptive innovation is about bringing out the creativity in others and myself; it’s teaching students not just through a lecture but through hands on practical experience, community based work, and building relationship across class lines. In other words, she says, it’s, breaking out of the box.”

Through her work as graduate assistant in the Women’s Center, Williams explained that breaking out of the box means challenging students to take responsibility and ownership of the programs, such as the Empower Leadership Retreat, which Williams will help facilitate with the Center in late February 2012.

Williams also sees disruptive innovation happening in her graduate classes at USD. The Leadership Studies program is unique in its experimental and interdisciplinary nature. Classes create a practice field for students, which Williams says, “Disrupts our standard picture of the professor-student relationship.”

Given William’s passion for student affairs and her desire to pursue a career in Higher Education Leadership, the Ashoka U Changemaker Campus partnership at USD immediately piqued her interest.

“As soon as I got to campus there was this buzz about this new [Ashoka U] distinction at USD. So, I started doing some research to learn more.” With fellow student Jaclyn Miller, William’s research evolved into a theory for change that states, “people have the capacity to initiate and sustain large-scale change when their organization is grounded in the exchange of (1) ideas, (2) relationships, and (3) mutual empowerment. These three attributes must exist within the individual, the organization, and the change efforts.” To get a deeper look into their work, take a look at the duo’s super fun and informative Prezi.

This Prezi collaboration turned into a semester-long project for an Organizational Leadership and Theory class. Combined with the opportunity to attend the Ashoka U Exchange, Williams represents an important student voice as change leader at USD.

As she looks ahead toward attending the Exchange, Williams says that what she hopes to walk away with “a better sense of what changemaking means to folks who have been more involved in social entrepreneurship at other campuses,” particularly when it comes to practical ideas that she can take back to the Women’s Center.

In exchange, Williams hopes to bring a student perspective to the conversation. “Being a recent college graduate and current student, I have a different perspective to share: what does change mean to me? What does impact me? How have I developed as a changemaker and what experiences have contributed to that?”

When asked what she thinks is most important for people to know about the Exchange, Williams replied, “People are the strength of the Exchange. They may not be from the same academic field, but we all come from a similar motivation of what we want to create. Regardless of where you come from, there will be something for you, and it might be something you’ve never heard of before.”

While Williams is looking forward to participating in the Exchange, she’s got plenty to do before February. Currently she is in El Salvador participating in an immersion trip and working with the community. After that she’ll come back to the Women’s Center where she’ll gear up the upcoming leadership retreat, and she’ll start up her second semester of graduate classes. Somehow she’ll manage not only to get all of this done, but also to do it with a grace that comes from doing what you are truly passionate about.

Did you know that the average American consumes over 3,800 calories a day? Imagine if you could take some of those excess calories and transport them halfway across the world, to a remote village in rural Tanzania…

That’s essentially what TABLE FOR TWO (TFT) does. There are approximately 1 billion people in the world who don’t have access to adequate food and nutrition. On the other hand, a roughly equal number suffer from issues related to overconsumption (e.g. diabetes, obesity, and other “lifestyle-related diseases”).

TFT simultaneously addresses these opposing issues through a simple meal. TFT partners with corporate cafeterias, university dining halls and restaurants, designating a healthy TFT meal. 25 cents of the proceeds is used to provide one school meal in sub-Saharan Africa. So by choosing the TFT option, you benefit from the healthy meal while at the same time providing the gift of a warm meal to a child halfway across the world.

What You Can Do
TFT is launching its “100 Campuses in 100 Days” campaign on January 17th, with a webinar at 6pm. Email infoUS@tablefor2.org to sign up and get call-in details. There will also be a special guest speaker that is scheduled join.

If you can’t make the webinar, just email infoUS@tablefor2.org and a staff member will give you all the updates.

This is the first of a series of posts featuring Exchange participants and their understanding of “Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education”. This week we will be featuring Laura White, Tulane senior student and founder of the nonprofit Swim 4 Success.

When you ask Laura White about reforming higher education, she doesn’t suggest lofty bureaucratic changes. She doesn’t talk about funding, tuition or budget cuts. When White envisions positive changes in education, she sees one principle as the fulcrum: empathy.

“The definition of well-being is so subjective,” she said, “and you have to be able to actually understand that if you want to help people.”

White is no novice at understanding and practicing social entrepreneurship. From Atlanta, White is studying political economy and education at Tulane University and has accomplished more by her senior year in college than many can aspire for.

A former Ashoka Youth Venture participant, White has created and led her own non-profit venture that brought free swimming lessons to underprivileged kids, and traveled the world studying different models of innovative education. She’s been a lever of change in Tulane University’s journey of becoming a leader in social innovation education as well. She was the program manager of the school’s first AshokaU leadership team; has worked with many professors, students and administrators on developing curriculum and initiatives on campus; and has partnered with professor Dr. Carol Whelan of Tulane’s teacher certification program to give students the opportunity to create and implement innovative projects in local schools that address a social need.

She’s scholarly, worldly and entrepreneurial.

So, White understands empathy.

And she thinks she knows how to bring it back into universities.

“In early childhood education, we understand the importance of social and emotional development. And so with that curriculum, there is more freedom to talk about warmth and empathy and how we care for other people,” White said. “And I think that that focus needs to be extended because we lose that when students enter higher grades.”

Students reach college and for the first time since young childhood have the freedom and autonomy to explore academically and socially. But rarely do universities use this space as a means to educate students to improve the world they live in. The disruption needed in higher education, White believes, is a vehicle to get students thinking about, leveraging and caring about one another.

“Universities have to make a commitment that higher education is about improving society,” she said, “and they have to provide resources and freedom for students to learn that, and then to create and innovate.”
White is looking forward to this AshokaU Exchange for the opportunity to network with “untraditional circles.”

“I think that if there’s a need that you see, you should be able to go out and solve it,” she said. “And not all young people feel that way, or are in a school that feels that way. The AshokaU Exchange is my favorite conference because it’s the most transformative group of people around.”

And White sees the AshokaU gatherings as an extraordinary breeding grounds for these types of disruptive ideas – ideas that turn people from apathy towards empathy.

White’s current project was sparked at the second AshokaU Summit in Washington, DC in 2010. There White met Alan Webb, a former AshokaU student and graduate of University of Virginia. The two partnered after asking the question of how to make community-based education accessible to all students. After working tirelessly to learn about how students learn and what universities offer, the two have come together to create a new model of spreading and sharing knowledge that empowers students to be changemakers.

The concept is called Citizen Circles, and according to White is a way to help young professionals and students self-organize learning groups around their interests, skills and passions.

“The purpose is to get groups and people asking the question of how they can make a difference and what resources and learning experiences they need to become the changemakers they want to become,” she said.

Citizen Circles is predicated upon the idea of empathy and community in a way that has the potential to shift how students learn. White founded a student group at Tulane called Women in Social Innovation according to this model; it is a group of women who come together to discuss their journeys towards becoming changemakers, and build upon the experiences and support from other group members. The groups are inherently community-based, their success based on the ideas and interests of its members. The groups are organized around the needs of its members, and the conversations and trajectory flow from the applied experience.

“It’s not going to be one person that comes up with the big idea to solve all of our problems. It’s going to be a lot of people making changes and differences in little ways,” she said. “Because you can’t just scale one great idea all the time. Often it takes community-based solutions.”

And isn’t that what empathy is all about? It’s about sharing. It’s about trusting. It’s about growing together as a team. And these, of course, are all lessons from early childhood.

Along with his wife Marty, Ron Cordes is the Co-Founder of the Cordes Foundation. He is also a Regent of the University of the Pacific, as well as Chairman of the Advisory Board for the university’s Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship. With a long track record in the investment industry, Ron speaks and writes extensively in the field of impact investing, and he chairs the Executive Committee for ImpactAssets, a new initiative to catalyze capital for impact investments.

With a focus on impact, it is no surprise that the Cordes Foundation has partnered with Ashoka U to co-develop the “Ashoka U – Cordes Innovation Awards.” Launched as an initiative in February 2011, Ashoka U aims to select the most innovative educational approaches in social entrepreneurship education. Examples of the 2011 finalists include the Brigham Young University On Campus Internship Class which engages up to twelve student teams each semester to work with social entrepreneurs to the Transformative Acton’s Institute curriculum which trains thousands of students on more than 20 campuses in 40 countries critical qualities such as resilience, creativity, and social and emotional intelligence.

With the leadership of the Cordes Foundation, the Ashoka U – Cordes Innovation Award will not only seek out top innovations, but it will also focus on impact by supporting the adaptation of award winner innovations by other colleges and universities to help accelerate the growth of the field of social entrepreneurship.

Here, Ron Cordes shares his vision for the Ashoka U – Cordes Innovation Award.

Q: How long have you been involved in social entrepreneurship education?

A: I was introduced to social entrepreneurship through the newly-formed Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship University of the Pacific, where I joined as a founding partner and Chair the Advisory Board. It was hard not to notice the social conscience of the Gen Y/millennial generation, and students at UOP had an amazing passion and desire to change the world. In partnership with the Center’s Director Jerry Hildebrand, we saw a huge opportunity to channel this energy and to equip students to be effective change agents – both while in college and after they graduate. At UOP, the team initially focused on experiential opportunities for students to engage with social enterprises, both locally and globally. The Center has operated a summer ambassador program for the last 6 years. More recently, they added a curriculum and certificate program in Social Entrepreneurship.

Q: Why are you partnering with Ashoka U to take the Innovation Awards to the next level?

A: Through my work at UOP, I began to recognize that the social enterprise phenomenon was occurring at dozens of colleges and universities across the US, but there was no coordination among the campuses to share best practices in this emerging field. When Ashoka stepped into a leadership role with the creation of Ashoka U, it seemed like the ideal vehicle to create a new collaborative platform.

So we became an early supporter of the Ashoka U Exchange and have been proud to support the conference to bring together leaders in social entrepreneurship education in 2010, 2011, and now again in 2012. When I attended the first summit in 2010, I was overwhelmed by the incredible interest and energy from students, faculty and administration to advance social enterprise at their institutions and how valuable it was to bring people together to move the field forward collectively.

At UOP, we think of the Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship as a social enterprise, and we are committed to applying the same level of innovation, and focus on results, with respect to our programs as social entrepreneurs who are doing work on the ground to solve social problems. This is why the Innovation Award is so resonant because it reflects the great work that is being done at the university level, and the promise of innovators in higher education as the drivers of high impact programs.

Q: What do you think the world will look like if all campuses have strong, thriving social entrepreneurship programs?

A: The world is coming to recognize that we are not going to be able to solve our biggest and most important problems using the same solutions that have been tried over the past hundred years. We are going to rely on this next generation of leadership to propel us forward – and that next generation is now being equipped at colleges and universities around the country and around the world.

It could be truly groundbreaking for thousands of young leaders to be inspired and equipped at colleges and universities, both in the US and around to world, and to find new ways to connect the social enterprise space in higher education to move forward with new innovative initiatives.

Many students seek to become social entrepreneurs after they graduate, but few of them receive support to do so. The Babson Social Entrepreneurs Action Learning Network (SEALN) pairs students with faculty and peers post-graduation to help improve their chances of success.

This past year the graduating cohort of Ashoka Changemakers at Babson College participated in the SEALN. Led by Cheryl Yaffe Kiser, Managing Director of the Lewis Institute on Social Entrepreneurship, and Julie Manga, Social Entrepreneurship Catalyst, these graduates have received intensive and individualized support in the weeks and months after they left the university. Both Cheryl and Julie felt there was a need for this more integrated approach because traditional course offerings do not address all facets of social entrepreneurship. As Julie Manga says, “‘there is what you have to know and who you have to be” to launch into a career as a social entrepreneur.

Thus, the SELAN works with the young social entrepreneurs to identify what they are committed to accomplishing in their first year out of school, while identifying personal and profession development goals. Julia Manga, as the facilitator and coach, partnered with the graduates to help them recognize personal strengths and areas of growth that they would like to develop further. The program is completely focused on supporting the cohort based on their individual needs.

In addition, via the SEALN, the cohort receives support from their peers. Every two weeks members of the cohort speak one-on-one with Julie and then participate in a group call. Conducted year-round, this comprehensive coaching process accommodates the real world rather than an academic calendar.

The inaugural cohort will now “pay it forward” to share their own experiences and lessons learned with this year’s cohort. This interaction helps to build a lasting community of practice, and faculty benefit from working side-by-side with social entrepreneurs as they implement their ideas, thus bringing the knowledge gained by the recent graduates back into coursework through action research.

The results have been positive due to the human centered approach of the program. SEALN recognizes that social entrepreneurship depends on personal characteristics such as tenacity, resilience and creativity, and the program integrates skill development as a key part of the learning process. Reflection on critical skill-sets needed for social change, and a healthy mindset, cannot be separated from knowledge development or what students need to know. The conventional classroom-based approach typically gives few outlets for discussing and addressing these issues.

How did the SEALN program get started? Cheryl Yaffe Kiser developed SEALN through her own institute at Babson. For faculty at other institutions interested in launching a new program, Cheryl recommends thinking creatively about cultivating relationships with administrators and decision makers. She also recommends contacting alumni who are committed to social innovation who may serve as advisors or funders. Even though it may take time, the development of entrepreneurial initiatives within higher education can help faculty maintain their commitment to innovative teaching as many colleges and universities are forced to scale back.

As Cheryl put it so eloquently, “supporting students in their entrepreneurial endeavors is rewarding for the faculty because these students are up to something big.”

As a co-director of Ashoka’s University program, I was eager to see Ashoka’s President, Diana Wells, receive the honor of Changemaker Campus George Mason University’s inaugural Social Innovation Champion Award as part of the new Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship’s conference on “Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship in the Age of Austerity.”

But I really started to pay attention when the opening keynote Senator Mark Warner began his remarks by simultaneously thanking his hosts while quickly challenging the fast growth of social entrepreneurship programs at universities by stating that he “cannot point to any [social entrepreneurship] program [in higher education] with a successful track record, and we need to push academic communities to add value to this sector.”

Given that Ashoka U partners with colleges and universities globally seeking to add value to both the academic and practical fields of social entrepreneurship, I had high hopes for what I might learn over the course of the day. What value can be created by educating the next generation of social entrepreneurs and changemakers? What role can higher education play in a rapidly changing world with increasing social and environmental challenges?

And I would not be disappointed by the thought provoking discussions held throughout the day. The opening discussion between Senator Warner and Bill Shore from Share our Strength pointed out the necessary connection between social entrepreneurship and policy for scale. Although Saul Garlick, CEO of ThinkImpact, in the NextGen Education breakout panel pointed to the serious gap in understanding and connection between government and the social entrepreneurship world, he rightly noted that bridging this gap requires a clear definition of social entrepreneurship, but that the academic work is nascent. Yet another call for academics to rise to the challenge.

Another theme that would ring true throughout the day was a call for more rigorous measurement. Especially in an age of austerity, funding needs to go to programs that work. During the lunch keynote, Mario Morino, co-founder and chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners and chairman of the Morino Institute, presented his new book, “Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity.” Ashoka President Diana Wells was recognized during the same luncheon for her field leadership, including designing and implementing Ashoka’s first Measuring Effectiveness initiative that has a methodology to better understand the changes social entrepreneurs are making in society.

Measurement can help institutions to become more self-aware and proactive. In this “sweep of human history,” as Marino called it, given the debt and deficit crisis, a lot of disruption is going to happen which can lead to a lot of opportunity. Morino specifically called on higher education to reinvent itself by accepting fiduciary responsibilities brought to light through measurement, while embracing an entrepreneurial spirit. Rather than “sitting on the titanic while the iceberg comes towards you,” Morino advises colleges and universities to consult with their students and faculty today about how to transform their institutions to prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.

This hopeful message about the potential of entrepreneurial transformation of higher education to benefit society continued in the post-lunch break-out session on “The Coming Prosperity,” a title that shares the name of Professor Phil Auerswald’s forthcoming book. Co-presenter, successful entrepreneur Muslim Lakhani, from ML Resources, encouraged his audience to embrace an entrepreneurial attitude to “wake up, try, fail, and try again, and then there will be more possibility for the future.” Muslim pointed to the Arab Spring as an example that today’s moment is not necessarily all about democracy building, but increasingly economic opportunity and prosperity. Hope in the form of dignity, livelihood, and opportunity, Muslim touted, is imperative to secure the future, “not for the next generation, but for a new generation.”

Diana Wells from Ashoka then returned to close the day as the moderator of the plenary discussion on “Job Creation, Recovery, and the Role of Social Entrepreneurs,” joined by Paul Carttar with the Social Innovation Fund from the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) and Terry McAuliffe, campaign advisor for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and co-founder and Chairman of GreenTech Automotive.

The panel kicked off by asking how social entrepreneurship can help with the job crisis. Paul Carttar from CNCS challenged us once again to start with the definition of a social entrepreneur. As a for-profit business entrepreneur, Terry McAuliffe defined social entrepreneurship as “trying to make the world a little better for other people” and explained his approach to “turbo charge” jobs and economic activity by buying China’s biggest electric car company and bringing it to America. Paul followed Terry’s lead by trying to address the nuance in the definition of social entrepreneurship by stating:

“I am less inclined to think about social entrepreneurs as individuals who found non-profit organizations, but rather as individuals who catalyze activities that create social value. The most important thing that a social entrepreneur can do is to come up with great ideas for legitimate needs that are not otherwise being satisfied by the status quo and to drive the creation of an organizational structure that is effective at creating value in a sustainable way. As a result, social entrepreneurs will contribute significantly to job creation and the well-being of our society.”

At the end of the day, I was left with several new insights and a call to action:

Insights: (a) Policy changes can help create a more conducive environment for socially beneficial for-profit businesses, in addition to scaling non-profit solutions to social problems; (b) Measuring impact is critical to make an effective link with government by gathering evidence to make the case for new policies and to scale programs that work; (c) Finally, we do ourselves a disservice by limiting the definition of social entrepreneurship as a non-profit phenomenon (and it was an insight that some people still do!) because this offers a reductionist view on what is possible. As Paul Carttar explains:

“It is great to hope that social entrepreneurship can be a huge factor for the jobs of the future, but this is only energizing with an expansive definition of social entrepreneurship. If we take a traditional view, then I would say that this is a very unfortunate indicator if non-profits are driving the jobs of the future. Wealth is created by the private sector. The best news that anyone engaged in the non-profit sector can get is that we have a rapidly growing economy. It reduces the number of people falling through the cracks. It also generates wealth that through philanthropy is deployable to the non-profit sector to support those who need it the most.”

So what is my call to action? I plan to work harder than ever to both measure and communicate the results of the Ashoka Changemaker Campuses. We can leverage this “sweep in human history” to set forth a powerful transformation in higher education to provide Senator Warner, and more importantly the next generation, with increasingly more colleges and universities that offer high impact social entrepreneurship education.

Academia can help clarify the definition of social entrepreneurship by engaging more students, both academically and experientially, with new models of social innovation. Professors can also develop more rigorous assessment tools to support practitioners, in addition to training students in new techniques. What is clear is that higher education has much to offer. But it cannot only be a progression from the past. We must leapfrog into the future by meeting the needs a new generation of students by helping them identify problems and create innovative, sustainable, measurable, and scalable solutions.

The first thing Anya Kamenetz said when she took the stage at a talk at the Center for American Progress to promote her new book was: “The book is up online so feel free to surf to it on your phones and check it out”.

When was the last time you had a professor or other speaker actually encourage you to browse on the internet, on your cellphone, while he/she was talking?

That opening statement, in a simple gesture, said as much about the new direction in higher education (Anya’s book is called The Edupunk’s Guide) as anything else that was said in the subsequent hour-and-a-half. But that’s not to say the panel discussion that followed Anya’s brief talk wasn’t engaging.

The group focused on a core question: in a vast world of learning possibilities, how can you thread the needle of validating one’s learning without necessarily a formal credential? So, for instance, if you are an expert at using Twitter for marketing, shouldn’t you have a formal credential for that, as it might be a better way to find a job than, say, majoring in a traditional academic subject? Or how about the skill of backpacking through Central Asia on $1 a day?

Peter Smith, of Kaplan Higher Education and one of the panelists, one summed it up: “We are all DIY learners. But the research shows that when we can put a credential on learning through formal assessment, the motivation to study and retention of learning goes up. We need to broaden that to non-traditional learning.”

Why is all this important?

For two reasons. First, as Phil Auerswald pointed out, universities tend to provide three things: learning, access to networks, and a credential. We now have multiple online and field-based opportunities for valuable learning, and social media gives us access to networks on a global scale. That leaves the credential. But students don’t actually consume their credential – they just re-sell them to someone else (i.e. their employer). As employers increasingly stop relying on academic credentials or create their own approved training programs (as influential corporations like Infosys or Walmart are doing), the demand for the formal credential will decrease. And that’s when non-formal learning could hit a tipping point.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, we need to recognize non-traditional learning because we don’t know what the future holds. Another panelist, Michael Edson, pointed out that his current job (Director of Web and New Media Strategy at The Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum) did not exist when he was in college. So students are going to have to learn how “to make a job, not take a job”, Kamenetz chimed in.

All of this has massive implications for the universities of today. As edupunk teachers and students increase in volume and influence, and go on to become employers, universities will have to evolve, perhaps even quite dramatically. Auerswald uttered what might seem like a heresy: “If you really want to be innovative, sell your campus”. Yet the other panelists, all major stakeholders in higher education, simply nodded gravely.

“The most successful schools of the future”, he went on, “are going to have 3000 or 3 million students, distributed globally”. More nods.

A change is gonna come.
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You can watch the entire discussion on the Center for American Progress website.