Critical Importance of Social Entrepreneurship Exemplified in Senior Capstone Projects

Innovation and entrepreneurial skills, combined with technological developments, in conjunction with requisite social and political forces, will likely be required in order to develop solutions to the significant problems affecting the world and to marshal the resources required to improve the lives of people. Social entrepreneurship allows for the evaluation of project success to incorporate explicit criteria related to improvements in “assets” beyond those that are easily measured monetarily. It is well established that projects and programs can typically only succeed when the social requirements and constraints surrounding existing problems and that of the proposed solution are properly understood. This results in the reality that there are no “standard solutions” because each situation has so many unique features. Two recent senior capstone design projects located in Kenya provide a strong learning opportunity for the students in applying the concepts of social entrepreneurship. The first project, completed in 2011, involved the use of Kenyan agricultural crop byproducts as a source of biofuels. This bio-fuels project required that the implementation support agricultural workers in recognizing the social and monetary value of investing in the bio-fuel production technology, and then assist in developing a method to operate an ongoing enterprise to manufacture and use the bio-fuel. The second project with completion scheduled in 2012, combines ceramic water filters, thermal-electric power generation and bio-fuels to improve the health of women and children in the homes surrounding Kitale, Kenya. The project to improve health also incorporates an implementation plan that uses an educational “marketing” of beneficial technologies to early adopters as a method to provide training to new users and to promote the spread of the technologies with funds from project sales. These two projects are used as examples that allow students to present descriptions of the learning experiences that resulted from incorporating the concepts of social entrepreneurship into these two capstone design projects, and how the project technologies themselves are shaped by the increased understanding of the conditions in Kenya.