OK.
So hi.
I'm Brittany Butler.
I'm the Executive Director of the Social Innovation
and Change initiative, which is a relatively new initiative,
almost two years old, at the Kennedy School
and an adjunct lecturer there.
I'm representing our team, the SICI team,
as well as my colleague Julie Battilana,
who is a professor at both HBS and HKS.
So I have to say we're maybe the team that
joined this group the latest and thus got
to benefit on riding the coattails of the ethics group,
of the search tool, of the fact that there will very soon
now be this syllabus search tool because that's
sort of our next step.
And so thank you, actually, to HILT for involving us.
So the mission of the Social Innovation
and Change initiative the Kennedy School
is to generate new knowledge, and also
to shape the practice of innovation
with a social intent.
So not innovation to make a profit and not
innovation for its own sake, but to solve
a specific social problem.
And we entered into this work essentially
because anecdotally, the student demand
was just like blasting up.
So our team was immediately overwhelmed by the number
of students coming in and asking for advice about which courses
they should take, asking about the I-lab, asking about HIVE,
asking about all the competitions on campus
and how they should be navigating those things.
So we entered with a set of questions about the curriculum,
but also a set of questions about
extracurricular activities and how those overlapped.
And the thing about social innovation, unlike many
of the things that have been described here--
but I think this is an increasing trend also
in higher ed-- is it's not actually a discipline.
At best, it's a phenomena inside of certain disciplines.
And yet year after year, the interest from students
keeps rising.
And as we talk to students about what they want and how they
want to make a difference in the world, they say look,
there's this specific social problem I care about.
And what's the scope and sequence
that I should be thinking through
as I prepare myself to go out there and do this?
And so we had terrible answers for them.
And so like very basic level, we just
wanted to know what courses are being taught?
What out-of-class innovation experiences are offered?
And how do the perceptions and experiences and demand
from the students and external actors
about what's available actually compare to the supply?
I mean, we just didn't know anything about this.
And so we are very much in this stage
and looking to go deeper soon.
So again, this is where we started.
So there was a report done in 2013 that gave us some
indication that 36% of cross-registration petition
across all the school--
so this is like a student making an extra effort
to go into another school because they perceive
that there's something at another school that
isn't available in their own--
30% of those fall into this category.
And many of the students who made those petitions
were denied.
So we know there's interest.
Just locally, again, the anecdotes were there.
And then on the supply side, very spotty.
But the challenge for us also was
it was difficult to answer questions
for prospective students.
And at the Kennedy School and at the business school
in particular, we were feeling the pain
of actually losing prospective students because even though we
had this intuition that as a whole,
Harvard University offers an incredible amount
on this front, we weren't able to represent that well,
and that was scaring us.
And then at the same time the students who were pursuing this
stuff would say, look, I've already taken--sort of that
first quote that you started with.
There's a lot of overlap between these two classes,
and I really wish someone could have given me a heads up about
that because I don't feel like I'm optimizing my time here.
That's how we started.
But as we move forward, some additional questions
surface that, again, I think, are
important as folks particularly think
about multi-disciplinary initiatives, or initiatives
that aren't clearly in a discipline,
but where student demand is high,
which is what is Harvard's responsibility to get clear
about this stuff given that social innovation,
social change aren't traditional academic disciplines.
And that's an open question, but it's something
that increasingly every year feels like we need an answer.
And what can and should be accomplished
through the curricular versus the co-curricular?
So the Social Innovation and Change initiative
actually runs a fellowship program.
It's a co-curricular program for 15 select students every year
who are working on advancing a project that they plan
to continue when they graduate.
They can get up to $30,000 to advance those projects
when they finish.
But is that the only experience that they should
be getting here in the school?
And how does that relate to what's
happening in the classroom?
So very much along the lines of what's
going on with the research stuff,
and how much is that shaping students' experience
here is something we want to understand better.
And then what opportunities are we missing?
And it just seems like there's a lot of low hanging fruit
that we don't really understand yet.
So this is just a quick sense of how
we approached putting our arms around this space
and even just defining what we're talking about.
Lucas, you spent a lot of time on this.
So just a sample.
This is just a sample.
There are 521 uni courses, so that's on the next slide.
But this is just a sample.
And look at the range.
Innovators, practice, finding, building, leading, good ideas.
Applied Music Activism.
Thermal Tectonics for the Next Billion People.
Designing for the Just City.
Innovative Approaches to Teacher Prep.
Innovation in Ministry.
These are all processes that certainly
aren't 100% overlapping, but where you can really
quickly come to understand that you need to be
able to define the problem.
There's a set of competencies here
that each of these students needs to get.
You need to understand the root causes of those problems.
You need to be able to iterate and think
in an iterative learning way about potential solutions
and make selections about those solutions.
And you need to understand your own role as a social change
maker.
And so despite the fact that they're
all across different schools and potentially
different in many ways, there's actually a lot of similarities.
And that's what we wanted to start to understand.
This is a set of key words.
We followed, again, on the coattails of the ethics folks
and did this sort of iterative process
of looking for key words in the course descriptions.
We would have loved to been able to drill down
to the level of the syllabi because we suspect
that when we talk about the competencies required
to be an effective social innovator,
it might be happening at that syllabus level.
And when we get there we will do that.
But in the meantime, it just gives you
a sense of the range of search terms that came up for us,
and then we would feed those back in to the system
until we came to this 521.
And so yeah, for next year, in terms of what kind of resources
can we use to support students and faculty in creating
a community and finding their way,
we've been thinking about a compendium of curricula.
We think that just would be an interesting contribution also
beyond Harvard, and that that would then draw folks
into the conversation broadly.
Oh, this is our big takeaway, which
is that pretty much every single school is offering courses
on this front.
And it's really pretty well-distributed.
There's an Other group here that represents
a couple of the schools.
But again, this, just like Erin said about the other,
this is our first cut at a snapshot.
We're still trying to figure out even what the bounds are.
And so a next step for us will also be connecting with
relevant faculty, faculty who are interested in this work,
particularly faculty who have sort of an experiential
learning pedagogy-- they seem to be very drawn to this--
and ask them for reactions to the set
of courses we've surfaced.
And then eventually just make recommendations
to improve the student pathway for making social impact.
Many of them come here and say that's kind of why they're
getting an education now.
And so how can we prepare them to do that well?
And then hopes?
Yeah, just that, again, the multi-disciplinary learning
journey in particular could be a little easier for students.
Right now we're very siloed.
I think we all know that.
And they feel it the most.
And then creating a connection between faculty
and students who would benefit from working with each other.
Even on this project, I feel like I've
connected with some of you who might not
have identified as falling into social innovation.
But when we get down to the nitty-gritty,
I think we're actually grappling with a lot
of similar questions.
And this idea of developing a one Harvard
ecosystem, especially when resources
are distributed across schools.
So the Kennedy School cannot own social innovation,
and we know that.
But Harvard as a whole really could
be a dominant player in this space if we could coordinate.
So there are certain topics where no department, no school
is going to be able to really shape a field,
but together we might be able to do quite a bit.
So that's where I'm at.