Featured Speakers
Katherine Sizov, C'19
Co-Founder of Strella Biotechnology
Miranda Wang, C'16
Co-Founder & CEO, Novoloop
Recorded Sessions
Miranda’s dream is to build healthy organizations that make our world a better place. For the majority of her life, she has led, founded, and volunteered for community and entrepreneurial projects.
Venture Lab and the Mack Institute for Innovation Management held an interdisciplinary panel discussion to explore what it means for tech to be 'clean', why its needed, and the emergent business innovations that have arisen in response to exacerbating climate challenges.
Currently, at Full Harvest, she is solving the massive food waste problem at the farm level. Full Harvest is the only B2B online marketplace connecting food and beverage brands and processors directly to farms to buy imperfect and surplus produce.
Salons & Sprints
Launched in the Fall of 2023, Social Entrepreneurship Salons and Salon Sprints will support students to build business solutions to contemporary social challenges.
Social Entrepreneurship Salons
Social Entrepreneurship Salons featured a single interdisciplinary panel of subject-material experts to discuss a social topic and its intersections with potential business solutions.
Social Entrepreneurship Salon Sprints
features a week of programming that includes a salon event at the start of the week, and mid-week workshop sessions held in quick succession to support ideation and the design of business models that directly address the challenge prompt from the salon.
Salon Sprint Week: Programming Overview
- Monday Kick-Off: Salon
- Tuesday: Design Thinking Workshop
- Wednesday: Theory of Change Workshop
- Thursday: Social Entrepreneurship Business Models Workshop
- Friday: Pitch Competition
Monday: The Salon
The Salon-Sprint week will kick-off with a Salon event featuring a 60 minute discussion and a 30 minute Q&A session about a problem statement prompt with a panel of interdisciplinary subject-material experts. Participants will be encouraged to think about a business solution to the problem statement, informed by the expert's perspectives.
Tuesday: Design Thinking Workshop
The next event in the Salon Sprint week is the Design Thinking Workshop. This workshop rapidly follows the salon to support participants in thinking about business solutions to the salon topics. The phases of design thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) are crucial to ensure a potential business solution is as impactful as possible.
Wednesday: Theory of Change Workshop
Following the Design Thinking Workshop, participants will attend a Theory of Change Workshop. This workshop will help social entrepreneurs develop the core of the business, and the company’s product or service, that will generate revenue and impact.
Thursday: Social Entrepreneurship Business Models Workshop
Following the Theory of Change Workshop, participants will attend a final workshop surrounding Social Entrepreneurship Business Models. This final workshop of the sprint will help participants bring together all of the pieces from the previous sessions; identifying a business model that will support the proposed solution and ensure that it is both viable and profitable.
Friday: Pitch Competition
Salon Sprint weeks will culminate in a Pitch Competition, where participants can pitch the solutions they have iterated during the week for funding to support its progression and development.
At least 1 member of each venture team that aspires to pitch must participate in each of the Sprint workshops.
At least 1 member of each venture team that aspires to pitch must participate in each of the Sprint workshops.
Workshops
Workshops designed to support members of the Penn Community interested in Social Entrepreneurship.
Join Venture Lab for a practical workshop on Design Thinking taking place Tuesday, February 26th, from 12:00 - 1:30pm in Tangen Hall Room 708.
From September 18th to September 22nd 2023, students participated in programming that encouraged them to think about viable business solutions to challenges within the intersections of climate change and the food system.
The Introduction to Impact Evaluation Workshop covered the fundamentals of impact evaluation with an emphasis on their use in social enterprises, and provided an overview of the industry-leading tools and measurement strategies to evaluate impact.
Venture Lab held a workshop on Design Thinking for Social Entrepreneurs. The workshop explored the principles of design thinking (including the five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test), with a focus on social enterprises.
Startup Stories
Find out what's happening across the #entrePENNeur community! Want to tell your story? Contact us at venturelab@upenn.edu.
