To study how Davids have conquered Goliaths and how other visionaries through history have succeeded in seemingly quixotic campaigns for social justice, environmental restoration and peace, Cornell will offer a new course in fall 2008 that focuses on best practices for social change.

Students in the four-credit course, Social Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Problem Solvers (Applied Economics and Management 338), will learn about entrepreneurs and innovators who use creative strategies to solve society's problems. Students will examine traditional methods of social change through history, then review the skills, strategies and ideas of effective social change advocates of today. Each student also will develop a business proposal for solving a societal problem.

The course will be taught by Anke Wessels, executive director of Cornell's CRESP Center for Transformative Action, partnering with Scott Sherman and Randy Parraz of the Transformative Action Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA).

Sherman and Parraz, who have been recognized as two of the world's "Best Emerging Social Change Entrepreneurs" by Echoing Green, a nonprofit organization that provides seed funding to social entrepreneurs, have been teaching the course for several years, and it has quickly become one of the most popular courses at UCLA. This past fall, they launched an initiative for the course to be taught at other top universities.

"I believe that young people are looking around and are quite aware that there are urgent social problems that need to be addressed," Wessels said. "They want to do more than argue and create deeper divisions between 'us' and 'them.'"

For students who are motivated to develop their businesses, the center will offer nonprofit status and incubation services to help the idea develop into a thriving organization, Wessels said.

"Students appear eager to apply an innovative, entrepreneurial approach to solving the world's most pressing problems," Wessels said.

As part of the initiative, Sherman and Parraz sponsor a national competition each year for the best ideas related to social innovation and entrepreneurship. The institute chooses 20 projects to each receive $50,000 in seed money to launch their organizations. Cornell students taking the course will be eligible to enter the competition.

The AEM course came about after discussions between Wessels and John Jaquette, director of Entrepreneurship@Cornell, which is working with others to develop more social entrepreneurship classes across campus.

Kathy Hovis is a writer/editor for Entrepreneurship@Cornell.