huffingtonpost.com - By Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen

Once a niche concept at the intersection of business and development, social entrepreneurship is now mainstream. A social entrepreneur, according to Ashoka founder Bill Draper, who coined the term in 1980, is a person with system-changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems. A social enterprise is one that deliberately expands access to goods, services, income, and employment opportunities for vulnerable populations as part of its core business while seeking return on investment. Social entrepreneurship is increasingly appealing to people, and the idea of using a MBA degree to do good while doing well has grown in popularity on campuses and in businesses around the globe.

At Harvard, the Social Enterprise Initiative is a big part of the MBA experience, with more than 90 Harvard Business School faculty engaged in social enterprise research and teaching. At Stanford, the Center for Social Innovation encourages business students to focus their academic efforts in areas such as the environment, international development, health care, and education; and the Social Enterprise at Kellogg (SEEK) program at the University of Michigan helps students understand the purposeful intersection between management and society across all organizations and industries. In the United Kingdom, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Saïd Business School stands out for its variety of social entrepreneurship electives and MBA projects on social innovation. These are some of the leaders, but just about every major business program around the world is moving to incorporate socially sustainable business practices.