Innovation & Social Change

Earn an MPA with a concentration in Innovation and Social Change

The Innovation and Social Change concentration prepares students to deal with large-scale, fast-moving change and innovation in public, private, and nonprofit service delivery. The focus of the concentration blends educational preparation with workplace experiences to provide greater degree specialization to meet your specific career goals.

Rather than focusing on a specific occupation or job title, the Innovation and Social Change concentration provides graduates with the flexibility to easily change careers or job sectors, which is reflective of current labor market trends.

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Take the first step toward obtaining the skills needed to create real change and solve today's most most pressing and complex issues.

Help organizations meet changing industry demands

Employees collaborating on a project.

Nonprofit and public organizations face myriad challenges, including funding uncertainty, increased competition, and the need to meet growing accountability demands. Leaders in those sectors can face those challenges by adopting more entrepreneurial approaches and practices found in the private sector, such as focusing on the scale of the organization, establishing better metrics, and being more innovative by introducing novel solutions and services.

Required courses (18 credit hours)

Analysis of concepts, methods, and procedures involved in managing public organizations. Problems of organization, planning, decision-making, performance evaluation, and management of human resources are considered. Cases are drawn from a variety of public services found at federal, state, and local levels of government.

An examination of the role of public affairs professionals in policy processes. Focuses on relationships with political actors in various policy areas.

This course provides an overview of theory and practice of organizational change. This course has a particular focus on organizational responses to the external environment as well as individual responses to organizational change.

The theory, size, scope, and functions of the nonprofit and voluntary sector are covered from multiple disciplinary perspectives including historical, political, economic, and social.

This course will survey issues in social entrepreneurship and engage students in completing class projects by applying principles and practices of social entrepreneurship to problems of nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and social-purpose business.

Learn the fiscal role of government in a mixed economy, sources of public revenue and credit, administrative, political, and institutional aspects of the budget and the budgetary process, and problems and trends in intergovernmental fiscal relations.

Innovation and Social Change students will also take two 3-credit-hour electives to complete the degree requirements.

Solve problems at the crossroads of policy, management, and science.