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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Mission-Driven Social Enterprise: Integrating Income and Impact
By Beth Battle Anderson Response to two papers with the conclusion: “While the practice of social enterprise is not new, our understanding of it is still extremely limited, and most arguments for or against it draw almost exclusively on a …
Putting Nonprofit Business Ventures in Perspective
By J. Gregory Dees In the lead chapter in a “how-to” manual for social enterprise produced by the Yale-Goldman Sachs Foundation Partnership on Nonprofit Ventures, Greg Dees lays out cautionary words about the challenges, costs, and risks associated with nonprofit …
Scaling Social Impact
By J. Gregory Dees, Beth Battle Anderson and Jane Wei-Skillern Arguing that social entrepreneurs have commonly sought to spread or “scale out” their innovations by replicating or “scaling up” their organizations, this article offers a framework for a larger set …
Double Bottom Line Project Report: Assessing Social Impact in Double Bottom Line Ventures
By Cathy Clark, William Rosenzweig, David Long and Sara Olsen The Double Bottom Line (DBL) is a relatively new concept for business leaders. We think of Double Bottom Line (DBL) businesses as entrepreneurial ventures that strive to achieve measurable social …
Latino Community Credit Union
By Victor Abad and Adam Elboim Through a unique partnership of the grassroots organization El Centro Hispano, the NC State Employees’ Credit Union, Self-Help Credit Union and the NC Minority Support Center, the Latino Community Credit Union was chartered in …
Sector Bending: Blurring the Lines between Nonprofit and For-Profit
By J. Gregory Dees and Beth Battle Anderson Traditional sector boundaries are increasingly breaking down. On small and large scales, for-profits and nonprofits are moving into new territories and exploring uncharted waters. While this kind of sector-bending is not entirely …
The Growth of YouthBuild: A Case Study
By Ayse Guclu, J. Gregory Dees and Beth Battle Anderson From its roots in 1978 as a project of the Youth Action Program in East Harlem, by early 2003, the YouthBuild movement had grown to encompass a network of over …
Scaling Social Impact: Strategies for Spreading Social Innovations
By J. Gregory Dees, Beth Battle Anderson and Jane Wei-Skillern How can social entrepreneurs effectively scale their impact to reach the many people and communities that could benefit from their innovations? As policy expert and author Lisbeth Schorr observed: “We …
Access, Common Agency, and Board Size
By Rajesh K. Aggarwal and Dhananjay Nanda We study the impact of the size of a firm’s board of directors on managerial incentives and firm performance. We present a model where a risk-averse agent (the top management team) performs multiple tasks …
Social Entrepreneurship is About Innovation and Impact, Not Income
By J. Gregory Dees Despite efforts to spread an innovation-based definition, far too many people still think of social entrepreneurship in terms of nonprofits generating earned income. This is a dangerously narrow view. It shifts attention away from the ultimate …