Interest in social entrepreneurship, which is sometimes defined as applying business strategies to solving social ills, has been steadily rising in recent years.
But what is it?
Social Entrepreneurship is commonly described as having more than one bottom line, or as many as three eg. in addition to financial performance, a firm’s environmental& social effets are also measured. Simply –> it’s not just about money.
Social Innovation
These social entrepreneurs are considered to be innovators, not necessarily business people, Dees says. They’re interested in reforming or revolutionising some sort of pattern of production or service.
Innovators typically create unique approaches that can help them better secure funding from individuals, corporations, community groups and the government. As such, they don’t operate as businesses in the traditional sense.
Lowry from Skoll says these “social entrepreneurs don’t want to give a man a fish or even teach a man to fish. They want to change the fishing industry.” To be a social entrepreneur, “you have to fundamentally change or eliminate a problem,” he says.
Social Enterprise
Enterprise entrepreneurs account for the other side of the social entrepreneurship coin. To avoid the constant search for funding that nonprofits must bear, many businesses “are market-based and use business methods for providing services or tackling a problem,” Dees says. In this respect, these ventures function more like traditional enterprises than their innovator counterparts, he says.
While socially innovative ventures typically operate as nonprofits, social enterprises can be either nonprofit or for-profit. Also, innovators tend to use their organisations as vehicles for changing public policy while enterprise entrepreneurs influence markets and bring about changes via business initiatives.
Mohammed Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, a microfinance lender and community development bank in Bangladesh, is a good example of an enterprise entrepreneur, as the bank operates as a for-profit entity owned by its borrowers. The Grameen Bank started as a for-profit entity in large part because nonprofits were looking for other sources of income. “He saw [this type of ownership] as a potential solution.”
Thanks to http://www.entrepreneur.com/
