Abstract:

Purpose:
The purpose of this paper is to present the potentiality of embedding social enterpreneurship practice into the business education for students through the case studies of two social enterprise –based model projects run by students in Vietnam for the benenfits of students, society in the long run.

Findings:
While more than 60% of students think that the project is a new idea to solve a social issue and 90% believe in order for the projects to grow, initiatives from students who run the projects are really important. 78% believe that they learnt to have new ideas and initiatives for the projects. While 90% think that social enterpreneurship is a good complementary component for the business training programs, skills that they obtain the most from running social enterprised model projects are shaping ideas about new products, communicating (including online and offline communication) and negociating with customers, online PR. Regarding business ethics and personal development, all of them feel more confident and more responsible. Most of them believe running social businesses enable them to raise awareness about social problems around them and shape the habit of initiating to solve the problems. They all choose to continue the projects or the similar projects even when they have graduated. They even intend to embed social enterprise ideas into their future businesses

Practical implications:
The researcher will expand the model with better cooperation with businesses where students will have more chance to access financial supports. Projects of the same type will be suggested by the researcher to embed into official training programmes.

Originality/value:
Although students are getting involved more in social activities and charity, there has been no connection between social responsibility and/or charity activities with business practice and innovation and entrepreneurship in universities in Vietnam. The research is in its early steps in discovering this model based on the test of model combining the three ideas of: Social Enterprise – Innovation – Business Experience for students. Preliminary results from the model applied in two projects initiated by the researcher, run by students help propose a model for sustainability that benefit students, businesses, universities and society.

Keywords:

Business education, social enterprise, business ethics, developing countries.