The past two decades have seen an explosion of healthy competition in the social sector. It appears that there has been a discovery of what the business sector learned from the railroads, the stock markets and the digital revolution: nothing is as powerful as a big new idea if it is in the hands of a first class entrepreneur.
Question is: social entrepreneur or business entrepreneur? Is it important to consider how useful social entrepreneurial models are, particularly in developing countries, where every sort of entrepreneurial venture - power generation, grocery stores, water sewage, housing construction and banking arguably fills a hole in the economy or infrastructure and is at least subconsciously acting as a social enterprise?
We do not consider PECO or British gas, both utilities, as socially entrepreneurial, but if their relatively cost efficient, reliable service delivery model is transported to Accra, Ghana or Pnomn Pehn, Cambodia would this be applauded as the work of social entrepreneurship? After all, what works and what does not for business is often the same regardless of the bottom line, right?
Nevertheless, in a general context, a social entrepreneur specifically identifies and solves social problems on a large scale.
The biggest challenges I would argue for social entrepreneurship are threefold:
1)Operating in an enabling environment.
2) Adopting effective and tailor-made measurements of social impact.
3) Unrealistic time frames.
The dominant driving factor in change-effecting social entrepreneurship will be the integration of innovation systems into social start-ups. It appears that there is one basic method of innovation (as varied as its outputs appear) and the fact that social entrepreneurs have decided not to charge the end-user high prices is not going to change the required method at all.
Social entrepreneurs will have to adopt the most productive methods of the best of the for-profit innovation model. This is because in order for their important ideas to be developed and scaled up, investors need to be assured that effective operational models are already at work.
As a young girl growing up in Soweto, Johannesburg in the 80s, I was reminded consistently of the perils of failing to help the local community in addressing its unmet social needs. We subscribed to the philosophy of “Ubuntu” – the idea that my humanity is inextricably linked to yours, that I am because we are. As such, the socially entrepreneurial spirit though limited by a difficult political environment was alive. Change in its small way was effected.
The same potential to make a change continues to exist today across the world. However, the reality is that the perception of social entrepreneurship as philanthropic in nature will have to change.
However else others perceive them, I doubt too many social entrepreneurs at the grass roots level see themselves as philanthropic, they're just to make that dollar bill :)
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