MJ Kaplan pushes her students to seek knowledge first and see solutions second. Her course provides a space for students leading social ventures to build skills and community over the course of a semester. Here she explains how she became an enterprise builder and what students gain from the study of social innovation.

Liza: How do you define social innovation?

MJ: I think of it really as some sort of breakthrough that fundamentally shifts either the why, the what, or the how of social impact. It’s not necessarily doing something fundamentally new. For instance, taking a technology that already exists and making it much cheaper or much simpler? That, to me, is a fabulous example of social innovation.

How did you get into social enterprise work?

I’ve always had an interest in cross-sector work. My work in the non-profit field always had to do with how they could apply better business practices to their work and I cross-pollinated in the private sector a lot of the values from the nonprofit sector. So social enterprise was really a no-brainer for me.

Where I got more involved was after the recession hit. Many non-profit clients were approaching me that I felt were operating on a deficit model. They were feeling like resources were drying up and they were sort of desperately shrinking and panicking. I started noticing and pursuing other organizations that saw the turmoil as an opportunity and were taking bold action to step back and rebuild fundamentally different approaches to their work. What I found working with startups and was that they were leapfrogging a lot of the dysfunction of existing organizations, leveraging technology and whole different mindsets about what’s possible. I got very excited about more experimental models and efforts coming out of the startup scene.

What can young social entrepreneurs gain from working on startups in a classroom context?

I think there are two main things. One is that a student who’s at Brown who has a social venture is really, really busy. They have an obligation to be pursuing an academic path and they also have this venture, not to mention a social life and who knows what else. So I think it’s really helpful for students to tie their interest in a venture and their passion in the field to their academics. It’s just expedient. And because social enterprise and innovation is so multidisciplinary it doesn’t matter if they’re pursuing economics or anthropology or a language or business. In fact, that diversity is really exciting and valuable; the students are bringing a lot of expertise into the classroom.

And two, it’s very seductive to get to the how; the practical things are really what anybody doing a startup wants to know. But I think that it better serves students pursuing the field of social entrepreneurship to have that backdrop of context, understanding economics and policy issues and ethical issues. We’re very mindful of trying to link those to the practical “Okay, so I get the complexity of those ideas and those structures, now what am I going to do for my venture?” We try to blend that.

What happens if a student completely changes venture plans during your class?

I’d say it’s rare to have a time when that doesn’t happen. It’s the nature of the field. You’re constantly iterating and being adaptive and there can be many twists and turns. It’s a roller coaster and part of what we try to do with the class as well as the fellowship is create a community, not only an intellectual community to support each other with tips and ideas that are specific, but also an emotional community for when they’re thinking “Oh my God, am I going to have to abandon this?” or “I can’t believe that screwed up!”

What keeps you motivated?

I think when you’re working in social change it’s really easy to get depressed and frustrated. It’s easy to get sucked into that. My work especially, not exclusively, with younger people keeps me very optimistic. I think that there’s just a growing desire to do the right thing. To take talent and creativity and channel it for social good. I think the most exciting thing in the whole field is that there’s a shift in capitalism. There’s an idea that capitalism doesn’t need to be creating the problems of society, it can actually fundamentally be part of creating the solutions. The private sector is creating a lot of new products and services that are growing the economy and do social good. So I am an optimist. I am.