Sustainability and Social Entrepreneurship Education with Eundeok Kim, Ph.D.

Dr. Eundeok Kim is a Professor in the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship specializing in Product Management. Her teaching and research interests are in new product development and management, trend analysis and forecasting, sustainability and social responsibility, and innovation and technology. She was recently awarded the Social Entrepreneurship SIG Award for Excellence in Social Entrepreneurship Teaching at the 2023 Annual Conference of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), the largest entrepreneurship association in the world. This award recognized Dr. Kim’s accomplishments in teaching, including the creation of the cross-disciplinary course "Sustainability and Human Rights in the Business World," incorporating numerous service-learning projects into her classes working with local social and commercial enterprises and non-profit organizations, and co-directing a multi-disciplinary internship program with Professor Terry Coonan visiting social enterprises and human-rights organizations in Kosovo last Summer. Dr. Kim commented, “I was very pleased and honored to be recognized through this special award, and I am grateful to everyone involved in my teaching, especially the community partners with whom I collaborated and my great students with the enthusiasm to learn and serve the community with the different projects."

We want to highlight Dr. Kim's award-winning course developed in 2018 in collaboration with Professor Coonan, a practicing human rights attorney and Director of the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at FSU. “Sustainability and Human Rights in the Business World” covers several environmental topics including air, climate, and water; forests, wildlife, and biodiversity; agriculture and food; and alternative clean energy and fuels, and it also explores the roles of the consumer, corporation, and government and non-governmental organizations. Dr. Kim stated, "The uniqueness of the course is the cross-disciplinary study of environmental science, business, and law (human rights)."

Dr. Kim has challenged students with problem-based service-learning projects in most of her courses since 2010. For these projects, a representative from local social or commercial enterprises spoke with her class about their business and their problem. The students then worked to solve the business's problem by developing sustainable new products, analyzing and forecasting the market trends, designing logos, and creating promotional strategies and materials for events. Some of the businesses and non-profit organizations that Dr. Kim has worked with include Ten Thousand Villages, BevShots, The Oasis Center for Women and Children, Neighborhood Health Services, and The Drug Information Service Center Village.

We congratulate Professor Eundeok Kim on her prestigious award and her dedication to sustainability and social entrepreneurship education! We also want to encourage students to enroll in her "Sustainability and Human Rights in the Business World" course which is open to all majors at the undergraduate and graduate level.