Preface

This book is the second volume resulting from the oikos Global Case Writing Competition—an annual program launched in 2003 to promote the publication of high-quality teaching cases in Corporate Sustainability and Social Entrepreneurship. The first volume titled Case Studies in Sustainability Management and Strategy: the oikos collection was successfully published in 2007. ¹ Numerous positive feedbacks since then have underlined our conviction, that there is a growing need for tested case teaching materials. Against this background, the second volume expands the collection with strong cases in the rapidly growing field of Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability. The selection includes winning cases of the oikos Global Case Writing Competition’s Social Entrepreneurship Track ² for which oikos has teamed up with Ashoka, the leading global Organization for Social Entrepreneurship. ³ The nucleus of our cooperation dates back to Harvard Business School’s 2008 Social Entrepreneurship Conference, where the editors met with Marina Kim, an enthusiastic personality dedicated to bringing Social Entrepreneurship topics into the classrooms of leading Business Schools. We joined forces, expanded the international judging committee of the program to add professors in the field of social entrepreneurship and launched the first call for Social Entrepreneurship cases in November of 2008. The call gathered more than 20 submissions from leading business schools. We are happy to present the best of these cases within this volume, along with best cases of the subsequent 2010 competition edition.