THE PUBLIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP CLINICS
TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION OF PROBLEM SOLVER
Offered in different disciplines, these project-based graduate and professional courses match students to public institutions to design more effective and legitimate solutions to complex public problems
WHO IS A PUBLIC ENTREPRENEUR?
WHAT IS PUBLIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP?
ABOUT THE PUBLIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP CLINICS
Previously offered at New York, Yale, and Stanford Universities, MIT Media Lab, New York Law School and online, past clients have included national, state and local institutions such as the White House, National Health Service, US Patent and Trademark Office, Presidencies of Mexico and Argentina, Lafayette Parish Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, Madrid Assembly, Connecticut Commissioner of Prisons and the Legal Aid Society. These programs aim to help institutions innovate and use new technology to become more effective and more legitimate while empowering students to become 21st century public leaders and problem solvers armed with a diverse and powerful toolkit for social change.
Read more about the clinics here.
Learn about the public entrepreneurship curriculum here.
How Do the Clinics Choose Projects?
In some classes, participants identify their own passion projects.
In most cases, the Clinic collaborates with public institutions to identify important and impactful projects for participants.
Although we address impact of technology on government, we choose our projects carefully, aiming only to advance social justice and progressive governance. Therefore we do:
1) Transparency projects — Students worked with a British non-profit on evaluating models for responsibly using administrative data to conduct impact evaluations while safeguarding privacy.
2) Citizen engagement projects — A team worked with Madrid’s city council to design Madrid’s first law on citizen engagement.
3) Data-driven social policy projects –A team helped the Legal Aid Society in New York dive into their 30 years of untouched data to improve how Legal Aid delivers services and to identify broader policy reforms.
We invite projects that:
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Have the potential to improve people’s lives;
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Can be developed in one semester and are implementable in a one-year time frame;
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Involve innovative leaders as clients willing to experiment and test what works;
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Involve the design of technology as well as the study of the legal implications of technology;
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Give students the opportunity to design and implement new products and projects and to do original, publishable research and writing.
TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADER AND PROBLEM SOLVER
GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN PUBLIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP
ABOUT THE GOVLAB
The GovLab's mission is to improve people's lives by changing the way we govern using new technology. Our goal is to strengthen the ability of public institutions and people to work more effectively and legitimately to make better decisions. The Clinics complement GovLab's work by catalyzing additional projects with public institutions and equipping a new generation of public entrepreneurs with the skillset and mindset to tackle important challenges. These project-based training programs blend substance with skills and ethics with innovation into a new curriculum to solve public problems.