Explore Cape Town, one of the world’s most exciting cities. Cape Town (or “the Mother City” as it is known to locals) is a beautiful, complex and cosmopolitan city which is, in many ways, the gateway to Africa. The town provides a fascinating context to learn more about Africa’s politics, economics, and geography and understand why Africa’s role internationally and issues within the continent itself are crucial to the world in the 21st century. In addition, we integrate the city into our courses, with trips to relevant places of interest. Finally, the stunning UCT campus, at the foot of the Table Mountain national park, also offers an inspirational location for study and lively debate and the Graduate School of Business campus at the Waterfront in central Cape Town.

Explore the idea of making a real difference in your life. We focus on the significant challenges of our time and provide a platform for exchange, solutions and change. It’s a complex challenge, and you need to accept a great challenge, excellent resistance and reality in the most stressful environments that exist in society today. We immerse ourselves in the so-called townships of South Africa to look at systematic change, ranging from change in values to technical solutions that work towards the SDGs.

Scope

The Bootcamp addresses locally defined societal challenges with social entrepreneurship as the core solution to high impact entrepreneurial activities and innovation while creating much needed economic activity in challenging environments.

The purpose of the Bootcamp is to challenge students to approach societal challenges with a structured and holistic entrepreneurial approach. Based on a challenge-driven pedagogy, students will learn how to approach open-ended societal challenges in a resource-constrained environment and use and implement systematic methodologies to identify problems underlying societal challenges and find viable and desirable solutions. In addition, students will apprehend how systems complexity and dynamics across different scales of a system impact and how societal challenges are perceived and addressed in the context of South Africa. Students will better understand what works (and doesn’t) in innovative startups and inspire leading-edge organizations to remake their marketplace. We will finally address and understand how to deliver new products and services in challenging settings.

The course takes a practical approach to understanding, teaching, and building businesses. The Bootcamp will give participants a better understanding of discovering and developing entrepreneurial ventures and frugal innovations in challenging environments.

Intended learning outcomes

• • How to systematically analyze and understand the problems underlying societal challenges.
  • How to develop viable and desirable solutions in a resource-constrained environment.
  • Develop, design, and create a detailed process-based innovative business for a specific technology, part of a business or based on a problem presented to you in a challenging environment.
  • Choose relevant key performance indicators and provide theoretical and empirical support.
  • Develop and design an implementation strategy with estimations of resources, time and capacity needed to implement the project successfully.
  • Provide a timely, dynamic and empirically well-motivated business model presentation.
  • How to engage with stakeholders/understand critical aspects of network building and resource allocation through social networks.

Pedagogy

The Bootcamp is based on Challenge Driven Education (CDE), where the participants form project teams working on societal challenges to contribute toward sustainable and viable solutions to the challenges. CDE is based on a high degree of interaction with societal stakeholders in everything from challenge definition to developing and testing solutions. The overall learning objective of CDE is to build competence to systematically research, develop and implement viable and desirable solutions to complex societal challenges.

Assessment

Students need to actively participate during the lecture week, create a business plan and presentation within a team, and hand in an individual written reflection assignment to pass the course.

Who Should Attend?

The target group is based on a thematic and multi-disciplinary approach. You need to be curious, open-minded and accept uncertainty in general, both in your learning approach and in life.

Eligibility

To be eligible, you must be a student or alumni of one of our member universities, KTH, SSE, KMH, Konstfack, SU or KI.

About the Teacher

Associate Professor Mikael Samuelsson has been involved in research, consultancy work and training of entrepreneurs since 1998. His research is used in both education and governmental programs. In addition, he is involved in development programs in South East Asia and Africa. Dr. Samuelsson has followed over 1000 new venture projects from birth and over a period of ten years.