At the HREC, we think about entrepreneurship in three broad categories; entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and idea entrepreneurs. While many people fall into more than one, these categories provide an analytical starting point to guide the clinic’s partnerships and projects.
Entrepreneurs in this context are human rights practitioners or advocates on the cutting edge of the field, including those beginning new organizations or those testing novel, innovative legal theories. This category can also include student entrepreneurs; the HREC encourages students with a vision for a change-making human rights initiative to develop their ideas and deepen their thinking through a structured advising process. Previous HLS student entrepreneurs, and the incredible careers they have gone on to have, are some of the biggest inspirations for the Clinic.
Intrapreneurs are those seeking to create or develop new initiatives within existing structures or organizations. These could include partners within human rights organizations seeking to expand or diversify their programming, assess and reconfigure existing initiatives, or begin a totally new project within the organization’s mission scope. In many ways, the HREC is itself an intrapreneurial project; the Clinic brings a new perspective to supplement the excellent existing human rights programming at Harvard Law School.
Finally, idea entrepreneurs are people or organizations who set out to transform an entire field or area of practice. Rather than focusing on a particular case or project, idea entrepreneurs take aim at the norms or beliefs which form the foundation of a field. A powerful example of an idea entrepreneur is Kimberlé Crenshaw and her theory of intersectionality. First coined by Professor Crenshaw in 1989, the need for practitioners to perform intersectional analyses of their work is now broadly considered to be fundamental in the human rights field as well as others. The HREC seeks to remain alert to burgeoning ideas that have the power to shape human rights practice for the better, bringing student and expert perspectives together to refine and promulgate these ideas.