ABSTRACT
According to management luminary Sumantra Ghoshal 1 management schools need to reconsider the basic foundations of their management approaches and curricula. Ghoshal asks that business education be much more in tune with societal trends and not just seek narrow goals at the expense of the well-being of the world community. This calls for a broadened understanding of value creation. The following fifteen cases deal with this challenge. They describe new patterns of value creation, new alliances and the challenges of dealing with existing paradigms. In this chapter we briefly introduce the cases and their core characteristics. This volume does contain a majority of cases on social entrepreneurship, but also a number of sustainability cases portraying entrepreneurs practicing innovative ways of doing business by integrating environmental and social questions into the core of the business model. We see that new ways of doing business are substantially shaping markets and society. While we do not want to engage in an academic discussion on the distinction of Social and Sustainability Entrepreneurship 2 we would rather encourage the reader to realize the conceptual variety of practices illustrated in this volume—these cases cover organizations with for-profit, hybrid and nonprofit business models—but all of them share a common objective of maximizing social impact.
