About this course: This free 6 week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions. We will debunk common assumptions around what resources are needed to begin acting as a social innovator. We will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. You will be able to purchase a Verified Certificate if you wish to show evidence of your achievements, but this is optional, and you may apply for Financial Aid if you are unable to pay the certificate fee. The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-created this course with RLabs, a social movement ‘born-and-bred’ in Bridgetown, Cape Town that is now active in 22 countries. The movement empowers youth through innovative and disruptive technology by teaching them vital skills and providing much needed support and a sense of community. Advocating and supporting initiatives such as RLabs forms part of the Bertha Centre’s mandate. The Centre is a specialised unit at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and is the first academic centre in Africa dedicated to advancing social innovation and entrepreneurship. You can view the course trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcWYG64WO20 Tweet about this course using the hashtag #socinnMOOC
Who is this class for: This class is for you! If you've always wanted to create social impact in your community or your business but didn't know where to start, the skills, tools and methodologies will help you get going. If you are already involved in a social business and want to take it to the next level, you'll find a supportive community, examples and case studies to inspire you. This course is suitable for business students, business owners, start-ups, entrepreneurs and professionals in any sector seeking to bring about social change.
Created by: University of Cape Town
Taught by: François Bonnici, Director
Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Taught by: Warren Nilsson, Associate Professor
Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Taught by: Marlon Parker, Founder
RLabs
| Level | Beginner |
| Commitment | 6 weeks of study, 2-3 hours per week |
| Language | English |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
| User Ratings |
Syllabus
WEEK 1
What's our problem?
Welcome to Becoming a changemaker! This week, we distinguish between simple, complicated and complex problems. Social innovation takes place in complex systems and complex systems have complex or “wicked” problems, like the kinds of problems the world is trying to tackle right now such as climate change, HIV Aids and other pandemics, poverty and inequality. A complex system has many variables or elements such as different sorts of people, material and rules and those elements of the system are interacting with each other so much that the complexity increases exponentially. So the work of complexity is about bringing yourself into the system, engaging with it, living with it and innovating in yourself as you innovate in that system that you’re working in. You can’t look at the whole system but you can look at more than one piece of it. The more you start to bring in different parts of the systems, you can then start to connect those in ways that they weren’t connected before.
10 videos, 5 readings, 1 practice quiz
- Video: Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation
- Video: About this course
- Reading: Meet your instructors
- Reading: How this course works
- Reading: What to expect in week 1
- Video: RLabs: Journey of Hope Part 1
- Reading: RLabs: Empowering Unlikely Innovators
- Video: What is Social Innovation?
- Discussion Prompt: What does Social Innovation mean to you?
- Video: Simple, complicated and complex
- Video: Wicked problems
- Video: The 5 Whys
- Video: Case study: Mothers2mothers
- Video: Reflecting with RLabs: problems
- Reading: Week 1 recommended readings
- Practice Quiz: Week 1: Test your knowledge
- Video: Week 1 Peer Assignment guidance
- Discussion Prompt: Your questions on complexity
Graded: What's your problem?
WEEK 2
What do we have to work with?
One of the hallmarks of very innovative organizations and people is that they see resources where other people don’t, and they can bring those resources to bear to create new innovative solutions. There’s transformative power in shifting from looking at needs, gaps, and what’s wrong, to appreciating strengths, resources and what’s right. Through developing a strength-based mindset and an appreciative approach you can discover hidden or underused resources. These resources might be people, kinds of knowledge and expertise, time, and physical spaces. As soon as you start seeing resources all around you, not only can you move forward but you become energised and hopeful, and creative things start to happen. You’ll find that you might be a lot richer than you think in terms of what you have to start building your own social innovation with.
6 videos, 2 readings
- Reading: What to expect in week 2
- Video: RLabs: Journey of Hope Part 2
- Video: Discovering resources
- Video: Appreciative inquiry
- Video: Case study: The Street Store
- Video: Finding hidden resources
- Video: Reflecting with RLabs: resources
- Reading: Week 2 recommended readings
- Discussion Prompt: Look around you, what do you see?
Graded: Week 2: Graded quiz
Graded: Optional honors assignment: Complete a resource audit
WEEK 3
Getting out of your comfort zone
By nature the world of social innovation is made of crossing boundaries, bringing together different actors, resources, spaces, but it can be overwhelming. Part of our challenge on the journey to becoming changemakers is to learn how to become comfortable with discomfort and how in the social innovation space where you take yourself into spaces and you surround yourself with people that you normally do not engage with. Understanding how we define differences using cultural, sociological, psychological and spiritual lenses and what the nature of the differences is helps to develop tools for getting out of your comfort zone. It takes a little bit of courage because it makes you uncomfortable, but that’s how you build the competencies, the personal resilience to engage with difference when we do go and drive for innovations or we look to make differences in communities that are unlike us or operate in a different way.
7 videos, 2 readings, 1 practice quiz
- Reading: What to expect in week 3
- Video: RLabs: Journey of Hope Part 3
- Video: Bricolage: recombining ideas and people
- Video: Thinking about difference
- Discussion Prompt: Thinking about difference and diversity
- Video: Engaging difference
- Video: Negotiating difference
- Video: Reflecting with RLabs: comfort zones
- Reading: Week 3 recommended readings
- Practice Quiz: Week 3 practice quiz
- Video: Week 3 peer assessment
- Discussion Prompt: Reflecting on stepping out of your comfort zone
Graded: Let's get uncomfortable
WEEK 4
Innovating by design
A number of methodologies and processes can help generate ideas and creative opportunities, and some of these have been used in business to generate new products and services, and are starting to be applied in social innovation. Human-centred design is incredibly important, and the Design Thinking process allows you to start early and wherever you are with whatever you’ve got. Design Thinking has evolved as a way to respond to deeper user insights, to connect more with people and with communities so that we can actually design solutions that are human-centred. Design Thinking is not just about products, but also helps create new processes, new systems, new services, and importantly even user experiences. Following a Design Thinking process will help you iterate and test your solution with end users, with an emphasis on failing early and often through trying things out and prototyping. Powerful Design Thinking methodology can help you to come up with human-centred design solutions that manifest economic viability, technical feasibility and social desirability in your social innovation.
9 videos, 2 readings, 1 practice quiz
- Reading: What to expect in week 4
- Video: Rlabs: Journey of Hope Part 4
- Video: Generating ideas
- Video: Design thinking principles
- Video: Design thinking steps
- Video: Design thinking case studies
- Discussion Prompt: Share your favourite social innovation
- Video: Discussing design thinking
- Video: Reflecting with RLabs: design in social innovation
- Reading: Week 4 recommended readings
- Practice Quiz: Week 4 practice quiz
- Video: Week 4 Peer Assignment guidance
- Video: Week 4 peer assessment artefact feedback
- Discussion Prompt: Reflecting on your prototype
Graded: Start before you're ready
WEEK 5
Changing the system - who me?
Understanding that social innovation is system innovation can help us appreciate why social innovation is so difficult to do. Social innovations can start to challenge and change the underlying system conditions that caused the social or environmental problem in the first place. We are asked to innovate around belief systems, or around authority, power, and resource flows. So, a social innovation challenges the rules of the game. Asking what’s innovative about the work means asking questions around the experiences of where an innovation might be changing the rules of the games and allows us to go deeper into the kinds of impacts that might be possible, and discover hidden impacts. When any kind of social innovation starts to get at the systemic roots, we’re going to be provoking anxiety. So it’s quite helpful to map out the social system and the rules that govern it and then to consider how you are challenging these rules through the innovation.
6 videos, 2 readings
- Reading: What to expect in week 5
- Video: RLabs: Journey of Hope Part 5
- Video: What's innovative about your ideas?
- Video: Social innovation as system innovation
- Video: Seeing system impact
- Video: Deepening system impact
- Video: Reflecting with RLabs: changing the system
- Discussion Prompt: Changing the system
- Reading: Recommended readings week 5
Graded: Week 5 Graded quiz
Graded: Optional honors assignment: Exploring your idea with the 5 system questions
WEEK 6
What if it works?
In the end social innovation is about impact. We’re all trying to have a meaningful, positive effect on the world, whatever that might mean to us. If we do this and we’re actually successful, this is going to take us sooner or later to the question of scale. How do we grow that innovation? As social innovations mature, the forms they could take and the multiple ways in which you could organise around achieving impact increase. It used to be easy to label organisations according to non-profit and for profit, and government institutions based on their purpose, its organisational structure and the way it measured what it achieved. That’s all changing. There are different ways to diffuse and scale the work that we’re doing to achieve impact.
7 videos, 3 readings
- Reading: What to expect in week 6
- Video: Rlabs: Journey of Hope Part 6
- Video: The evolving world of social innovation
- Video: Organizing social innovation
- Video: Financing social innovation
- Video: Scaling social innovation
- Video: Reflecting with RLabs: moving forward
- Reading: Week 6 recommended readings
- Video: The journey ahead
- Peer Review: Your journey ahead
- Reading: Resources
- Discussion Prompt: Where to from here?
Graded: Week 6 Graded quiz
FAQs
How It Works
Coursework
Each course is like an interactive textbook, featuring pre-recorded videos, quizzes and projects.
Help from Your Peers
Connect with thousands of other learners and debate ideas, discuss course material, and get help mastering concepts.
Certificates
Earn official recognition for your work, and share your success with friends, colleagues, and employers.
Creators
University of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town is the oldest university in South Africa and is one of the leading research universities on the African continent. UCT has over 25 000 students, of whom 30% are postgraduate students. We offer degrees in six faculties: Commerce, Engineering & the Built Environment, Health Sciences, Humanities, Law, and Science. We pride ourself on our diverse student body, which reflects the many cultures and backgrounds of the region. We welcome international students and are currently home to thousands of international students from over 100 countries. UCT has a tradition of academic excellence that is respected world-wide and is privileged to have more than 30 A-rated researchers on our staff, all of whom are recognised as world leaders in their field. Our aim is to ensure that our research contributes to the public good through sharing knowledge for the benefit of society. Past students include five Nobel Laureates – Max Theiler, Alan Cormack, Sir Aaron Klug, Ralph Bunche and, most recently, J M Coetzee.
Ratings and Reviews
This course was fantastic!! What I loved most about it was that the course was client-focused. I had an idea, and their course helped me to develop and improve the idea so that I can positively affect my community. It was a class where I wanted to get all the ideas down because they were so innovative. I love how there was one main case study, R Labs, and how we were able to learn about their challenges and how they managed to successfully impact their community. The professors were great, they had an abundance of knowledge and I learned so much from them. Well done!
Some materials
This course is amazing in combining theory-based approaches with practical thinking and tools which can be applied easily to a broad variety of complex problems. It offers a broad range of useful readings and the opportunity to discuss questions and issues with other students online. Being well familiar with beeing graded at school and university I like the free approach because it trusts that students want to learn, that cooperation contributes to learning and that learning is about compassion. The course also connects theory with individual motivation and making concrete steps. I deeply appreciate this offer and am thankful that I have found it.
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BA
I have learned a lot from this course and it has helped to open my mind to solutions which are already existent within environment rather than inventing something new.