Jamie Muskopf is a student in the Doctor of Social Work program in the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. She is the significant other (S.O.) of an active duty Naval officer, the mother of three children, host of the podcast S.O. Unbecoming with Jamie Muskopf, and currently works as a Digital Innovation and Mobile Program Manager for an agency in the Department of Defense.
Jamie earned a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Santa Barbara, a Master of Science in Information Systems from Hawaii Pacific University, and most recently a Master of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy from Columbia University in the City of New York.
As a career technologist who once made web-based software and served as a knowledge management officer for the Department of the Navy, you might wonder why social work and why social innovation? Now more than ever, businesses need to leverage the collaboration, inclusion, and empathy of people to maintain their edge and efficacy in a world increasingly driven by technology, artificial intelligence, and big data. These idealized business behaviors are a part of the 21st Century skillset, are inherently social, and to leverage the unique power of people in our organizations, we need to consider looking at our organizations through the lenses of social innovation and social change.
Social entrepreneurship is not reserved for the independent business owner. It involves a series of practices and a way of approaching work that can be applied in every organization at every level. Jamie’s goal is not only to explore this in her doctoral work by creating a capstone innovation to help eradicate social isolation in the military community, but to help industry apply empathy and the science of social work to how we design, plan, and lead the businesses of the future.