The Social Entrepreneurship Lab (SEL) is a 2-4 month, cohort-capped incubator that builds purpose-led ventures with the rigor of a top-tier business program and the systems thinking of regenerative practice. Each cohort takes 5 founders through the full venture-design arc: articulating personal purpose, designing a minimum viable product, constructing a research-driven go-to-market strategy, modeling financial viability under uncertain conditions, and validating against real stakeholders. 

The program is built for the underdog: early-stage founders working in cultural, civic, scientific, political, and creative economies whom mainstream incubators routinely overlook in favor of high-growth tech. By the end, participants leave with a strategically scalable venture that is investable on its own terms, and a the network to position it in a regional market still organized around extractive logics.

SEL is the latest expression of a longer learning practice inside Studio Madane. Between 2019 and 2023, the Creative System Operators Working Group ran a series of Learning Programs through its Working Groups. 

It evolved into an ecosystem-centric design program in 2023, and crystallizing into SEL's first cohort in 2025. In 2024, Studio Madane won the CCI Best Practice Prize (CREACT4MED) awarded by EMEA and IEMed, validating the approach beyond Lebanon. SEL25 was co-sponsored by EMEA and IEMed, and SEL26 was co-sponsored by the Anna Lindh Foundation.

• Purpose is the first design input, and we're strict about it! Each founder begins by articulating personal motives then maps that purpose onto a business offering.
  
• We import processes, not solutions. Founders build MVPs grounded in systems that endure volatility yet have explicit impact pathways. The tools are modern: ecosystem visualization, AI-augmented analysis, transformation frameworks, and stakeholder modeling.
  
• Ventures as regenerative and stakeholder-driven organisms. Ventures are designed as living entities embedded in cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems. A model that depletes the systems it depends on isn't viable.
  
• We're practitioner-led. Mentorship comes from people who have built and scaled purpose-driven ventures (i.e. activists, coaches, creative leaders), as opposed to detached consultants.