Applying Ignatian-Inspired Practices to Business Education

Tina Facca Miess, PhD, Associate Professor of Marketing and Director of the MA in Nonprofit Administration at the Boler School of Business at John Carroll University and collaborator of Jesuit Networking shares about the impact of Ignatian pedagogy in the promotion and development of social entrepreneurship initiatives.   
Social entrepreneurs differ from commercial entrepreneurs in that they work to solve a social problem. They scale up and even franchise just as traditional business would. They work toward being a self-sustaining social enterprise with revenues generated by the beneficiaries themselves, giving them a consistent income for their contributions to society. I am currently offering a summer course entitled “Social entrepreneurship for sustainable social change” in Guadalajara, Mexico. The summer course students are from varied fields including industrial relations and Human Resources, Finance, International Relations, and Architecture, yet share a passionate commitment to improving the quality of life for others while earning a reasonable living doing it.
Ignatian pedagogy (context, experience, reflection, action, evaluation), is used to structure the 4 week course, and mission-oriented frameworks including Catholic Social Thought and the Integrative Justice Model are presented as tools for investigating and analyzing social problems and designing social innovations to help solve them. Social entrepreneurs develop social enterprises to implement their vision and connect business and society more effectively.
The students will begin developing their own entrepreneurial endeavors using the Business Model Canvas as a template, producing resume-ready outcomes grounded in their discernment of their individual vocations and higher calling.
 
Tina, along with her colleagues, invite all interested to participate in the 2017 Colleagues in Jesuit Business Education Annual Meeting: “Using our Work for the Common Good: The Transformative Power of Jesuit-Inspired Business Practices.” The meeting will be held from July 6-9 at Creighton University. For more information and to register, visit their website.
Finally, we also invite you to participate in the Global Survey on Jesuit Networks developed together with the support of Tina and her team at John Carroll. For more information or for suggestions, comments and feedback, you can reach her at: [email protected]