Businesses have a vital role to play in solving social and environmental issues through innovation, market development, and entrepreneurship.
Faculty who work with the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise are at the forefront of research, teaching, and engagement related to helping businesses address these problems. We provide students distinctive experiential learning opportunities and collaborate with organizations to help to tackle the grand challenges of our time, such as climate change, ecosystem degradation, and poverty.
Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise BusinessFeed
Summary: In 2020 this paper was one of 14 recipients of the inaugural American Marketing Association’s AMA-EBSCO Annual Award for Responsible Research in Marketing, which honors outstanding research that produces credible and useful knowledge that benefits society. Gupta et al examine cross-subsidization business models employed by non-profit health care organizations in low- and middle-income countries. The Aravind Eye Hospitals in India deliver free eye care services to the needy as mission activities which are subsidized by charging other patients market prices. This approach allows Aravind and other non-profit organizations to fulfill both their mission-oriented and revenue-generation goals. Examining this dependence in the context of Aravind, Gupta et al measure nine years of marketing outreach camps, and find that although these are marketed only to poor patients, the camps attract paying patients as well, in effect acting as advertising for Aravind. Using model estimates, the authors’ findings challenge conventional beliefs about the subsidies required by mission activities, as the incremental revenue accruing to Aravind from a camp exceeds the camp’s cost.
The Center provides hands-on learning opportunities for graduate students interested in learning how businesses address environmental and social problems through innovation and enterprise. Click on the map to learn more about the diversity of companies and types of challenges we work on.
My best decision at Johnson was joining SGE. Hands down!
Mikey Arsnow, MBA '19
The SGE program is more than a class, it is a community building exercise. We worked hard but also played hard while learning about win-win solutions for business and the world.
