Social Innovation

3 units

Social innovation focuses attention on the ideas and solutions that create social value, as well as the processes through which people generate and capture them. This year's theme is community wealth building: cooperatives, collective entrepreneurship, worker-owned businesses, and trusts. Community wealth building is a bottom-up approach to economic development based on greater democratic ownership, participation, and control that we can begin to develop and scale. The goal is to create a democratic economy and displace the extractive economy. We will review the latest literature and policy documents then meet with practitioners and communities driving this work forward across our St. Louis region. We will learn and apply innovation methods like design thinking, Google sprints, and asset mapping. Graduate students from across campus (MSW, MPH, MBA, MSP, and more) will work together as teams to develop a pitch or policy brief applying community wealth building and shared prosperity approaches to the Greater St. Louis area.