Olin College : About Olin : Press Release

August 25, 2011

Olin Professor, Babson Colleagues, Share Prestigious Pedagogy Award

Stephen Schiffman, associate professor of entrepreneurship at Olin College of Engineering and Babson College, recently shared a prestigious pedagogy award with two Babson colleagues for an innovative course they developed.

Schiffman, along with Heidi Neck, professor of entrepreneurial studies at Babson, and Erik Noyes, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Babson, were awarded the Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award for their class, Social Entrepreneurship by Design. The course was taught at Babson.

The Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division and McGraw Hill present the annual award to individuals who develop and implement an innovation in entrepreneurship pedagogy for either graduate or undergraduate education. The purpose of the award is to encourage the development and dissemination of innovations in pedagogy.

An undergraduate-level course, Social Entrepreneurship by Design combines entrepreneurship with user-oriented collaborative design (UOCD), a process that helps designers create products or services based on an understanding of user needs. UOCD is employed in engineering design courses at Olin, most notably in a course of the same name. The Babson course represents the first application of the approach to a course focused on entrepreneurship.

"Social Entrepreneurship by Design is a reworking of UOCD to transform it from a course that has students propose products and services to one in which the students wind up proposing new ventures," notes Schiffman, who says he had the permission of the Olin developers of UOCD to transfer its approach to Babson's entrepreneurial environment.