The CASE Knowledge Center is a collection of our research, writings, articles, and interviews we have published and conducted on social entrepreneurship over the years. You can use the category listings on the side of the page to filter the publications to your particular topic of interest. If you have any questions, please contact us at case@fuqua.duke.edu or subscribe to our newsletter below.
#COVID19CapitalRelief Database
Scaling Pathways
Through the Scaling Pathways series, CASE partners with the Skoll Foundation, USAID, and Mercy Corps Ventures to share lessons, insights, and analysis from transformative social enterprises in driving impact at scale. The series includes in-depth case studies, cross-cutting theme papers on key challenges and opportunities related to scale, snapshots of scaling organizations, and more.
Explore Scaling Pathways Knowledge Products
Angel Networks in Emerging Markets
The U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Partnership to Advance Entrepreneurship Initiative (PACE) funded CASE to research opportunities for development institutions to support angel networks to drive private sector investment in entrepreneurship in Latin America, Middle East/North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Explore Angel Networks in Emerging Markets Knowledge Products
SEAD: Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke
The Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD) was a five-year accelerator program in partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN). Through the accelerator program the SEAD team has captured lessons learned and policy implications to ensure that our work impacts both entrepreneurs on the ground and the broader development community.
Creating Large-Scale Change: Not ‘Can’ But ‘How’
By J. Gregory Dees Scaling impact is a very serious and challenging issue, but we need a better way of framing the conversation. The author proposes three reframing steps: • Reframing step # 1: Shift from “can” to “how can” …
Social Ventures as Learning Laboratories
By J. Gregory Dees In this article, Greg Dees argues that, in the wake of the financial crisis, we need “entrepreneurship that creates greater long-term value while drawing on fewer resources and generating fewer destructive consequences”. Financial pressures cause social …
Scaling Social Entrepreneurial Impact
By Paul N. Bloom and Aaron K. Chatterji We introduce a conceptual model that proposes seven drivers—or organizational capabilities—that can stimulate successful scaling by a social entrepreneurial organization. These drivers/capabilities are identified by using the acronym SCALERS, which stands for: …
Rhetoric, Reality, and Research: Building a Solid Foundation for the Practice of Social Entrepreneurship
By Beth Battle Anderson and J. Gregory Dees Beth Anderson and Greg Dees raise questions about some of the rhetoric around “earned income strategies” in arguing that the nascent field of social entrepreneurship needs to build a strong foundation of …
Philanthropy and Enterprise: Harnessing the Power of Business and Social Entrepreneurship for Development
By J. Gregory Dees Social entrepreneurs and supportive philanthropists are challenging conventional assumptions by deliberately using business ventures to serve the public good. This idea of using market forces in strategic ways to promote social improvements is not new, but …
Cultivate Your Ecosystem
by Paul N. Bloom and J. Gregory Dees Social entrepreneurs not only must understand the broad environment in which they work, but also must shape those environments to support their goals, when feasible. Borrowing insights from the field of ecology, …
Taking Social Entrepreneurship Seriously
By J. Gregory Dees The article discusses the concept of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship emerged in the 1980s from the work of Bill Drayton that provided fund for social innovators around the world. It comes into its own in the …
Girls on the Run International: “A Lot More than a Running Program”
By Paul N. Bloom Girls on the Run International oversees an educational program that puts pre-teen girls through a 12-week curriculum that uses running-related activities to teach self-respect and healthy living habits. From its start in 1996 as a small, …
Approaches to Scaling Social Impact
By John Kalafatas Organizations face many options about what to scale and how to scale their impact. The spectrum of goals and strategies for creating and scaling social impact ranges from impact through direct service to impact through indirect influence. …
Framing a Theory of Social Entrepreneurship: Building on Two Schools of Practice and Thought
By J. Gregory Dees and Beth Battle Anderson Social entrepreneurship has been gaining momentum as an academic subject. In the past decade, numerous schools, particularly, but not exclusively, business schools, have launched new courses, programs, centers, or research initiatives embracing …