Center for Social Innovation

Elective Courses

As an MBA or Sloan Master’s Program student, you may tailor your coursework to match your personal interests and discover how MBA skills can drive solutions to social problems in all sectors. Each year, the PMP offers 20-30 electives in public policy, nonprofit management, social and environmental entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, and more. These courses highlight collaboration among government, nonprofit, and business entities and explore various paths to creating social and environmental value. Most GSB students take at least one of these courses. Recent offerings have included:

• Environmental Entrepreneurship
• Health Care Technology: From Innovators to Providers to Patients
• The Power of Social Technology
• Ethical Issues in the Biotech Industry
• Growth and Stabilization in the Global Economy
• Political Economy of Health Care in the United States
• Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability
• Environmental Science for Managers and Policy Makers
• Strategic Management of Nonprofits
• Social Entrepreneurship

Public Management Certificate

The Certificate in Public Management is available to those students who wish to focus their elective coursework on topics in social and environmental management. The Certificate is evidence of a student’s preparation for and commitment to addressing public issues and can serve as an important signal to future employers.

• Students who wish to pursue a Certificate must complete a minimum of 16 PMP elective units, including an approved Economics course.
• Students may petition according to the specified deadlines to include independent study projects or other Stanford University courses for Certificate credit.

Annual Public Management Initiative

Explore a topic of social or environmental interest with your peers through the Public Management Initiative (PMI). Teams of students compete each spring to lead the following year’s PMI, an academic initiative of the PMP. The winning team selects one topic to explore in detail throughout the academic year and engages the GSB community in discussion and debate.

The PMI topic for 2009-10 is “Debating Tomorrow: How will business change after the crisis?”

Past PMI topics have included:

• Making Markets Work for the Least Advantaged in the U.S. and Global Context (designing an academic course)
• Greening the Bottom Line (converting the GSB’s catering service into an eco-friendly, profitable enterprise)
• Climate Change: Energy, Economics and Corporate Policy (publishing a Climate Change primer to contribute to the public debate surrounding the reality of global warming)