Welcome to the course Growing the Impact of Your Social Enterprise. You are participating in the third course of the Copenhagen Business School MOOC Specialization on Social Entrepreneurship. My name is Kai Hockerts and I am Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at the Copenhagen Business School. Here I teach on social entrepreneurship, both on our Danish campus, where we're now, as well as on our China campus in Beijing. As I will explain shortly, most peer evaluation exams of this course are organized around a business plan of your social enterprise. Which you should have started working on as part of your earlier two courses in this specialization. Moreover, we will use terminology that we have developed in the first courses. And we will refer back to the cases we have discussed earlier in this specialization. These references will not make sense to you if you have not taken the first two courses. Thus, if you have not yet participated in the first and second course of the specialization, then I strongly suggest that you first take the time to enroll in those two courses before you participate in this one. What we are going to do over the next five [weeks] is look at the following topics. Firstly, we will talk about social impact assessment. This is an important topic if you want to make sure that you're actually achieving your social mission as you implement your business plan. Next, we will talk about the communication strategy of your social enterprise. And in particular, how to market your product and services to beneficiaries and other customers. Here we will focus on how your communication strategy has to change as you move from early adopters to a much broader market share. Then we will talk about growth strategies and how you can scale and replicate your business plan internationally in order to reach a larger number of beneficiaries. In particular, we will discuss organic growth, social franchising and an open source approach. Finally, we will talk about exit strategies. By this, we refer to the option social enterprises have when they need to finance their growth but the original funders cannot or do not want to finance the expansion. One exit strategy for original funders is an initial public offering, IPO, in which new shares are issued and sold on the stock market. Alternatively, social enterprises can be bought by other market players. In each week, you will receive as always in this specialization two tasks. Firstly, you will have what we call the optional case assignment. This is based on the last video segment each week in which we introduce you to the topic of next week. And ask you to think through a few questions relating to that case. There's no deadline and no evaluation for this assignment. You can do this either on your own or if you like, you can upload your ideas in the Coursera discussion forum. The graded submission each week will be the peer evaluation exam. This will always have to do with your own business plan. We will ask you to reflect upon how the topic discussed during the past week is relevant to your business plan. Thus, if you do not have a business plan, you cannot easily participate in these exams. After you have submitted your own exam answer, you are required to come back to evaluate the answers of several of your peers. This process is important since it allows you to compare your own submissions against those of your peers. Take advantage of this opportunity. Please note that there can be no deadline extensions, even for very good reasons. On the other hand, we have designed the course so that you can still pass if you miss one or possibly even two exams, for as long as you do well on the other exam submissions. Our peer evaluation scale, as you should know by now, has four grades, which are as follows. Zero means: I could not see how this submission relates to the assignment question. One means: this is an adequate submission although it has major weaknesses. Two would be: this is an interesting perspective on the assignment although it has some weaknesses. And three is: this is a well-reasoned contribution and I was delighted to read it. Peer evaluation exams are supposed to be short. Just three to four paragraphs. So please, keep your submissions succinct. Actually, if you go considerably over that length, you may get lower marks in the peer evaluation exams. Being able to write an exam answer that is short and to the point is part of the grading requirements. Now, as is obvious from this discussion, you will need a business plan in order to participate in the peer evaluation exams. Typically, we encourage group work for this. Most of you will probably continue with the business plan from the first and second course of this specialization. And you will most likely do this with the same team that you have worked with in the past courses. However, if your group has disbanded or you no longer want to work on the topic from the first two courses, then you are welcome to join a different group. On the other hand, if your group has lost members in the transition from second to third course, then you should try to recruit some new team members. Use the discussion forums for this. If you need more members for your business plan group, then start a thread with a short description of your business model and the skills that your team needs.
