so·cial en·ter·prise (n.)
An organization or venture that advances its social mission through entrepreneurial, earned income strategies.
Social Enterprise Lexicon
A standardized set of definitions that provide a common basis for communications among practitioners, funders, management assistance providers and scholars.
Social entrepreneurship
Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas business entrepreneurs typically measure performance in profit and return, social entrepreneurs assess their success in terms of the impact they have on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors.
History
The terms social entrepreneur and social entrepreneurship were first used in the literature on social change in the 1960s and 1970s. It came into widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s, promoted by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Bill Drayton the founder of Ashoka, , and others such as Charles Leadbeater. From the 1950s to the 1990s Michael Young was a leading promoter of social enterprise and in the 1980s was described by Professor Daniel Bell at Harvard as 'the world's most successful entrepreneur of social enterprises' because of his role in creating over 60 new organizations worldwide, including a series of Schools for Social Entrepreneurs in the UK.
Although the terms are relatively new, social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship can be found throughout history. A list of a few historically noteworthy people whose work exemplifies classic "social entrepreneurship" might include Florence Nightingale, founder of the first nursing school and developer of modern nursing practices, Robert Owen founder of the cooperative movement, Vinoba Bhave (founder of India's Land Gift Movement), and Shri Hedgewar (founder of Rashtriya Swaymsevaka Sangh). During the 19th and 20th centuries some of the most successful social entrepreneurs successfully straddled the civic, governmental and business worlds - promoting ideas that were taken up by mainstream public services in welfare, schools and healthcare.
Current practice
One well known contemporary social entrepreneur is Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The work of Yunus and Grameen echoes a theme among modern day social entrepreneurs that emphasizes the enormous synergies and benefits when business principles are unified with social ventures. In some countries - including Bangladesh and to a lesser extent the USA - social entrepreneurs have filled the spaces left by a relatively small state. In other countries - particularly in Europe and South America - they have tended to work more closely with public organizations at both the national and local level.
The George Foundation's Women's Empowerment program empowers women by providing education, cooperative farming, vocational training, savings plan, and business development. In 2006 the cooperative farming program, Baldev Farms, was the second largest banana grower in South India with 250 acres under cultivation. Profits from the farm are used for improving the economic status of the workers and for running the other charitable activities of the foundation.
Some have created for profit organizations. A recent example is Vikram Akula founder CEO of SKS Microfinance, the McKinsey alumnus who started a microlending venture in villages of Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Though this venture is For - Profit but already initiated a sharp social change amongst poor women from villages.
There are continuing arguments over precisely who counts as a social entrepreneur. Some have advocated restricting the term to founders of organizations that primarily rely on earned income – meaning income earned directly from paying consumers. Others have extended this to include contracted work for public authorities, while others still include grants and donations. This argument is unlikely to be resolved soon. Peter Drucker, for example, once wrote that there was nothing as entrepreneurial as creating a new university: yet in most developed countries the majority of university funding comes from the state.
Today, nonprofits and non-governmental organizations, foundations, governments and individuals promote, fund, and advise social entrepreneurs around the planet. A growing number of colleges and universities are establishing programs focused on educating and training social entrepreneurs.
Organizations such as Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, the Skoll Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Echoing Green, UnLtd (UK), the School for Social Entrepreneurs (UK), the Manhattan Institute, the Draper Richards Foundation and Civic Ventures, the Canadian Social Entrepreneurship Foundation (Canada) among others, focus on highlighting these hidden change-makers who are scattered across the globe. Ashoka's Changemakers "open sourcing social solutions" initiative Changemakers uses an online platform for what it calls collaborative competitions to build communities of practice around pressing issues. The North American organizations tend to have a strongly individualistic stance focused on a handful of exceptional leaders - while others in Asia and Europe emphasize more how social entrepreneurs work within teams, networks and movements for change.
Youth social entrepreneurship is an increasingly common approach to engaging youth voice in solving social problems. Youth organizations and programs including Youth Venture, the International Youth Foundation's
YouthActionNet program, Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) and others promote these efforts through a variety of incentives to
young people.
There remains a vast social terrain that continues to go largely unreported in most news, though the recent exposure of Google.org may start changing our society's awareness.
Fast Company Magazine annually publishes a list of the 25 best social entrepreneurs which they define as organizations "using the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems." Recently, the International Youth Foundation published a book titled Our Time Is Now: Young People Changing the World that highlights the stories of more than thirty young people in over twenty countries who are taking action to change their local and global communities. The book spotlights the efforts of young leaders who are addressing a host of urgent global challenges: poverty, violence, racism, environmental destruction, and civic apathy, to name only a few.
The International Business Leaders Forum, an NGO which promotes responsible business practices, has shown how multinational companies can support social entrepreneurship - either through in their businesses, engaging in public policy debate or creating better internal climates within their organisations.
What is a Social Entrepreneur?
Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.
Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.
Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.
Each social entrepreneur presents ideas that are user-friendly, understandable, ethical, and engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement with it. In other words, every leading social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers—a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything.
Over the past two decades, the citizen sector has discovered what the business sector learned long ago: There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.
Why "Social" Entrepreneur?
Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss and improving systems, inventing new approaches, and creating solutions to change society for the better. While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale.
Historical Examples of Leading Social Entrepreneurs:
Susan B. Anthony (U.S.): Fought for Women's Rights in the United States, including the right to control property and helped spearhead adoption of the 19th amendment.
Vinoba Bhave (India): Founder and leader of the Land Gift Movement, he caused the redistribution of more than 7,000,000 acres of land to aid India's untouchables and landless.
Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy): Developed the Montessori approach to early childhood education.
Florence Nightingale (U.K.): Founder of modern nursing, she established the first school for nurses and fought to improve hospital conditions.
Margaret Sanger (U.S.): Founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she led the movement for family planning efforts around the world.
John Muir (U.S.): Naturalist and conservationist, he established the National Park System and helped found The Sierra Club.
Jean Monnet (France): Responsible for the reconstruction of the French economy following World War II, including the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The ECSC and the European Common Market were direct precursors of the European Union.
Social Enterprise (Social Entrepreneurship)
"Nonprofits have to recognize that they're businesses, not just causes. There's a way to combine the very best of the not-for-profit, philanthropic world with the very best of the for-profit, enterprising world. This hybrid is the wave of the future for both profit and nonprofit companies."-- From "Genius At Work" - an interview with Bill Strickland, CEO of the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild and the Bidwell Training Center Inc.
The nonprofit environment has changed.
Community needs are growing in size and diversity.
More nonprofits are competing for government and philanthropic funds.
Traditional forms of funding are becoming smaller and less reliable.
New for-profit businesses are competing with nonprofits to serve community needs.
Funders and donors are demanding more accountability.
"In the face of this new reality, an increasing number of forward-looking nonprofits are beginning to appreciate the increased revenue, focus and effectiveness that can come from adopting "for profit" business approaches. Increasingly, they are reinventing themselves as social entrepreneurs, combining "the passion of a social mission with an image of business-like discipline, innovation, and determination."-- From "The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship" by J. Gregory Dees.
