They are known by a variety of names: a centre for social impact, a program on social entrepreneurship, a social innovation initiative. Yet regardless of the focus and structure, such university-based social impact centers have experienced explosive growth.

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They are known by a variety of names: a center for social impact, a programme on social entrepreneurship, a social innovation initiative. Yet regardless of the focus and structure, such university-based social impact centers have experienced explosive growth. A decade ago, only a handful of schools invested in this work; today, almost 50 percent of the top 50 business schools in the world host a social impact program, initiative, or center.

Deeply intrigued by this groundswell, Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, and the late Pamela Hartigan, who was director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, commissioned The Bridgespan Group, a global nonprofit advisor to philanthropists and nonprofits, to analyze these trends among university-based social impact centers, and reflect with experts as to what might lie ahead. After extensive discussion of the findings, we offer the following summary that may point the way towards accelerating future growth.

The headline is that social impact has entered the mainstream, often led by tremendous demand from students (and increasingly, alumni) for more robust programming and solutions. No longer a niche concept, our research found that university-based social impact centers (an umbrella term for the purposes of this report) have now successfully moved beyond the “1.0” stage and are increasingly considered must-have offerings on the crowded radar screens of deans and senior faculty sponsors, not to mention wealthy alumni. Increasingly, university leaders are tying these centers’ missions ever more closely in to their schools’ overall core missions. These cross-departmental (and often cross-graduate-school) centers are playing an important and distinctive role as a hub of networking and knowledge, both within their institutions and beyond.

As a result of this extraordinary demand, center leaders globally report feeling pulled to serve a diverse range of stakeholders—from students to professors, researchers, practitioners, and even philanthropists and governments—against a sprawling variety of societal crises—from public education to climate change to health inequities to the role of corporations in society, and beyond.

University-based Centres have come a long way in the last decade. Thousands of students, researchers, and private and social impact practitioners are engaging globally on critical issues. This established credibility lays the foundation for further progress.

In particular, four especially signi cant opportunities for Centres emerged for the years ahead:

Educating and preparing a broader, blended range of student talent for social impact work across the social and private sectors
Driving deep expertise as the basis for dramatically propelling actionable research
De ning social impact as a structured academic discipline
Developing and tracking measures of student impact in the world

For even the biggest and best-funded Centres, therefore, the best strategy may not simply be to do more of everything but rather, to establish a baseline level of services for all constituents, and then focus on making signicant progress within one distinct area of greatest potential impact, such as student training and careers, practitioner networks and convenings, a big research idea, or a core curricular area, over a 3-5 year time frame.

Read the source article at The Bridgespan Group

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