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WRI Event to Focus on Social Entrepreneurship

3 min read

The rise of social entrepreneurship — providing goods and services that provide a positive impact on society — will be the subject of the 2015 Social Entrepreneurship Boot Camp this weekend at the University of Arkansas Winthrop Rockefeller Institute on Petit Jean Mountain.

The event runs begins at 11 a.m. Friday and continues through Sunday. A Friday night keynote address featuring Noble Impact co-founder and entrepreneur Steve Clark will begin at 7.

Noble Impact is a Little Rock nonprofit that partners with the UA’s Clinton School of Public Service to offer a primary- and secondary-school curriculum centered on social entrepreneurship. Its program is in use at eStem public charter school in downtown Little Rock. 

Clark’s keynote will address the rise of social entrepreneurship in Arkansas and its burgeoning startup ecosystem. The event is open to the public, but registration is required and available here.

The event represents a partnership between WRI, the UA’s Office of Entrepreneurship, the Clinton School and the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub.

Clark is a UA graduate who lives in Fort Smith. He founded supply-chain management firm Propak and co-founded digital innovation firm Rockfish before launching Noble Impact in 2012.

Other speakers scheduled to appear include: 

  • Phyl Amerine of Fayetteville’s Startup Junkie Consulting
  • Permjot Valia, international investor and entrepreneur, founder of Mentor Camp and Arkansas goodwill ambassador
  • Westrock Coffee CEO Todd Brogdon
  • Trish Flanagan of Noble Impact, former director of the UA’s Social Entrepreneurship Pilot Initiative
  • Ben Kaufman of the Walton Family Foundation
  • John Montgomery of San Francisco Bay-area law firm Montgomery & Hansen
  • Nikolai DiPippa of the Clinton School

Doing Well, Doing Good

The boot camp’s aim is to provide training for new and aspiring social entrepreneurs, focusing on business skills, legal issues, scalability, measuring impact, ethics and benefit corporations, which are for-profit corporate entities designed with legally defined goals of providing a positive impact on society and the environment.

In short, the boot camp will encourage entrepreneurs to do well by doing good. While Arkansas has had to play catch up to much of the rest of the nation in building a foundation for tech startups to thrive, many believe it could be a leader in terms of social entrepreneurship.

“Arkansas has all the ingredients to be a thought leader in this field,” Noble Impact CEO Eric Wilson said.

Innovation Hub director Warwick Sabin said social entrepreneurship is a critical part of the growth of the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. He said many challenging issues could benefit from the application of free-market enterprise principals and an entrepreneurial mindset.

“Those challenges can be become business opportunities that lead to economic development,” he said. “After all, identifying problems and creating a unique solutions is the essence of entrepreneurship.”

Plus, Sabin believes young people today are attracted by the idea of “doing well by doing good” and “measuring their impact by more than just the bottom line of an income statement.”

“If we can do more to promote and support social entrepreneurship in Arkansas, we will succeed in retaining more young talent and attracting more young talent to our state,” he said.

Social entrepreneurship caught the attention of officials at the UA. Its Office of Entrepreneurship added a social entrepreneurship program this year in response to interest from students, said director Cynthia Sides. 

“Social entrepreneurship has a broad definition and thus can have a broad impact,” she said. “Many of our students are interested in either forming companies that have a social impact or nonprofit ventures that use a business model. Social entrepreneurship is becoming popular with students from a variety of disciplines, including the STEM fields, as more students are looking to work on projects and for companies that make a significant difference within the local communities, state, and even world. We want to offer a program that will provide the students on our campus with these opportunities.”

In 2014, the the UA’s IGNITE (Industry Generating Nanomaterials, Ideas, and Technology through Education) program was incorporated into the Office of Entrepreneurship to reach more science and engineering students and expose them to research commercialization and forming technology startups, Sides said. 

She said the social entrepreneurship program launched this year would be expanding in the next few months. 

More information on the Social Entrepreneurship Boot camp is available here.

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