School of Business

The 2025 Leicester Masterclass is themed around social enterprise. As the world we live in seems to lurch from one crisis to another, the Masterclass will explore the role that businesses can play in improving the economic, environmental and social contexts within which we all live. We will draw on all your business acumen and entrepreneurial skills to produce new ideas for improving the ways in which we do things.

The Leicester Masterclass has been designed to bring together theory, practice and application, drawing upon the expertise of innovation and entrepreneurship academics from within the School of Business, the real-world practice of local social entrepreneurs and your own experience, knowledge and creativity in order to develop an idea for a social enterprise.

Working in teams, you will draw on all aspects of business acumen, and position these alongside an understanding of the wider social, economic and environmental contexts within which businesses operate. Your challenge is to devise. design and implement an entrepreneurial strategy to create an effective social enterprise. The Masterclass culminates with each team presenting and defending their social enterprise idea to a Dragon’s Den-type panel of social entrepreneurs and academic experts.