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How to Change the World: Can Social Entrepreneurship Be Taught?
The Sophist caught up with David Bornstein to talk about his latest book, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas; social entrepreneurship; the evolution of the citizen sector; and lessons learned and to be taught.
A Burgeoning Sector
In the first chapter of How to Change the World, David Bornstein tells a story of an almost unnoticed worldwide dot-org boom--as significant as the dot-com boom. To cite just a few statistics, the public service groups registered with the Internal Revenue Service in the United States went from 464,000 to 734,000 between 1989 and 1998--over a 60 percent jump--and a Johns Hopkins study of eight developed nations between 1990 and 1995 found that employment in the citizen sector grew two and a half times faster than in the overall economy.1
Although the numbers are compelling, they don’t tell the full story of the citizen sector (Bornstein’s preferred term for what is also known as the nonprofit, independent, or third sector): “The growth of the citizen sector is just a very rough gauge…. It’s like saying economic growth is up. There’s still a lot of poverty in the world; there are still a lot of other problems. It’s just a general trend.”
Bornstein stresses the importance of qualitative change over quantitative change, “There are more organizations that are out there, but there are also more organizations out there that are strategic. There are more organizations out there that are connected to one another in interesting partnerships and networks.”
With the sector exhibiting remarkable growth, social entrepreneurs--“transformative forces: people with new ideas to address major problems who are relentless in the pursuit of their visions, people who simply will not take ‘no’ for an answer, who will not give up until they have spread their ideas as far as they possibly can”2--are increasingly important and prevalent. They have always existed, but with the sector burgeoning, one of Bornstein’s basic tenets is that social entrepreneurs can and should be supported by society.
These individual social entrepreneurs, these citizens, are critical in driving the development of the citizen sector:
If you think about the ancient, original idea of what a citizen is and the responsibilities and duties of a citizen, you get much more of the idea of a citizen being a custodian of society, one who is actively involved in the creation of the kind of society that we want to build. There are some very noble ideas attached to citizenship. The original conception of it did not mean somebody who doesn’t commit crimes and pays his taxes--which is pretty much what people think citizens are today. It actually meant something much more robust than that. I think that social entrepreneurs are acting in their capacity as citizens, in that robust sense.
The Role of the Individual
Throughout the case studies and portraits in How to Change the World, the social entrepreneur appears as a driven, motivated individual. When asked if social entrepreneurship relies too heavily on a few committed individuals, Bornstein recasts the question: “Does the corporate world rely too heavily on the entrepreneurs who build those businesses? No. They’re the people who build the businesses. Ultimately, they go away, and then the business will either succeed after them, or the business will flounder and go bankrupt.”
But there are differences between the sectors--in the citizen sector the longevity of the idea takes precedence over the survival or profit of the organization. “When a social entrepreneur has been successful at demonstrating a new idea--at marketing it by going around talking to 100,000 people over many years, saying we should do this, we should be providing micro credit to people, we should be supporting social entrepreneurs, we should be vaccinating children, and this is how we can do it--what happens ultimately if they’re successful, their organizations don’t have to exist forever. The idea that an organization has to be sustainable and be around for eternity is a myth.”
Bornstein points to two organizations who have championed an idea: “If you look at the Grameen Bank [which pioneered offering small, collateral-free loans to poor people] as an example, or if you look at Ashoka [an organization dedicated to identifying and supporting social entrepreneurs in their work] as an example, both of these organizations could go out of business tomorrow, and their basic ideas would have been demonstrated--certainly not to their fullest potential, but enough to be able to say, ‘They have been successful. They have altered the behavior and the mindsets of people throughout their fields.’”
There are more than 3,000 micro credit organizations worldwide. “If [the Grameen Bank offices] close their doors tomorrow, it would be painful in the short term for most of their borrowers, but the idea would still exist, and many other organizations would continue to carry it forward. An industry has been created; an idea has become sustainable, by virtue of the fact that people recognize the value of the idea.”
For Bornstein competition and its refining powers are important: “What you want to have is hundreds of other organizations, if not thousands, that recognize Ashoka’s contribution but then try to do it better than Ashoka….”
The original entrepreneur becomes dispensable if she succeeds in advancing her idea to change established patterns and modes of thought. Comparing the role of the entrepreneur to that of wooden supports around a sapling, Bornstein says, “The social entrepreneur is like that for an idea. He has to be there to support the idea until it’s deeply rooted. At a certain point, the idea has its own life. It will be carried forward by others.”
Returning to the Grameen Bank, Bornstein notes:
The role of micro credit has only been ensconced as an idea that’s not going away in the last decade. In the 1990s, it really took off. But if you look at the growth of micro credit since 1997, when there were 7 million people receiving micro loans, and today, when there may be as many as 70 million, according to the micro credit summit campaign, that’s an enormous growth…. In 1997, when the Grameen Bank represented almost a third of the entire micro credit field, it would have been an enormous setback for the industry if the bank went away. Today, the Grameen Bank’s borrowers represent only a small percentage--under 5 percent--of total micro credit clients. The main role of the bank today is not demonstrating the viability of the idea, but reminding the new bankers to keep their focus on very poor clients, not just clients who are easier to bank with.
The important factor is not the organizations that are created to support an idea but what they represent: the initial insight into how to address a problem or tap into new possibilities. Bornstein elaborates:
What you’re really talking about is the creativity, the innovation. You’re not just talking about creating an organization. Anybody can create an organization. You’re talking about the qualities that the entrepreneurs have, constantly looking for new opportunities, seizing changes, responding to new possibilities, and continually pushing an organization to reach beyond where it’s been. Those things can definitely be lost. If Steven Jobs had died of cancer when Apple Computer was a year old, it’s very possible that that whole idea--democratizing access to these powerful information tools--would have faltered and had to wait for another champion. And who knows how long it would have taken? Those are the sorts of questions you need crystal balls to answer.
Listening and Learning
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| Jeroo Billimoria, founder of Childline, a 24-hour emergency response system for children in distress |
Social entrepreneurs create a vision for a better world and then plan for that future. How do they do it, without crystal balls?
“Entrepreneurs are really famous listeners,” Bornstein notes. “Almost everybody who’s done research on the entrepreneur notes the fact that you have these people who are very humble when it comes to listening to others and yet very aggressive when it comes to pursuing their own ideas.”
For Bornstein, listening is key to what entrepreneurs ultimately achieve. “The deep listening is really the deep learning--learning from others and integrating the perspectives of others and really understanding how everything works and constantly changing your map of the world based on a conversation you just had.”
While listening and learning are important to the development of the entrepreneur and her idea, listening and learning are also essential to spreading the great ideas that already exist.
How do we resolve ethnic conflict? How do we teach disgruntled youth who have dropped out of high school? How do we get them to recognize their potential and to want to be motivated to participate in society? How do we create opportunities for disabled people around the world? These are things that have been demonstrated in parts of the world and in such a way that their ideas are very useful to other people. We haven’t yet created mechanisms to spread these ideas, these blueprints. People don’t look for them; there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel going on right now.
To capitalize on the ideas that exist, “Learning is the next major challenge. We need learning more than we need more social entrepreneurship now. We have a lot of useful models out there now that have no where near reached their potential in terms of where they could go.”
Bornstein sees blueprints, franchise models, and replicable systems as the best potential growth area for the citizen sector: “The beauty of having social entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs is that not everybody has to invent new models. Not everybody has to be supremely innovative and have boundless energy.”
Businesses fail at a rate of at least 50 percent, but franchises fail less than 20 percent of the time, and some, as little as 10 percent. For Bornstein, this is a strong testimony to the value of documenting and disseminating ideas and strategies. “The role of the entrepreneur is to develop a new idea and demonstrate it forcefully, undeniably, then create the system so that idea can get out there in the world where other people can take it up and run with it,” Bornstein asserts.
What Can Be Learned Now
Effectively disseminating existing ideas and specific strategies is the next big challenge, as Bornstein notes, but what can be learned now from and about social entrepreneurship in general?
There is a lot the citizen sector can share, especially with for-profit businesses, Bornstein believes.
What I think the nonprofit sector has going for it is distribution channels; there are very large markets around the world that the business sector knows nothing about. All those micro credit organizations, they’re reaching 70 million families. Every year, if they’re successful, the purchasing power of those families increases. People like Fabio Rosa [a social entrepreneur who works on affordable rural electrification in Brazil] are developing low-cost systems to rent poor people solar panels, and when the clients get electricity, they’re going to buy water pumps, TVs, electric showers. Ultimately businesses are going to want to sell to these people, but it’s the social entrepreneurs who understand right now how to find these people and serve them, and that’s an enormous advantage they have…. Social entrepreneurs are constantly defying the assumptions about what kinds of things are possible and doable at large scale. This is an enormous potential source of opportunity for the business sector.
Despite Bornstein’s articulation of what the citizen sector has to offer, mainstream thinking tends to encourage nonprofits to learn from for-profits, to become more business-like. There are two primary reasons. One, the for-profit sector is older: “Business is a much more mature sector. When more mature sectors meet less mature sectors, there’s the assumption that they have more to teach.”
Two, “The reason why the knowledge direction is historically one-way is just a function of the wealth and prestige of the two sectors,” Bornstein explains. “The business sector is considered a ‘real’ sector; it has huge amounts of money, employs the bulk of people in society, and it’s where the power is.”
When the nonprofit sector is perceived as a second-class sector, a “respect gap” is created:
That respect gap has led to the fact that the sectors haven’t worked very well together. Social entrepreneurs are the best way to break down that respect gap and build bridges because everybody respects them. Take Muhammad Yunus [founder of the Grameen Bank]--whether you’re running a Fortune 500 company or a nonprofit, you can see that this man is clearly a terrific entrepreneur; he’s brought tremendous changes. The social entrepreneurs who are really able to build up remarkable organizations can grab the attention of people in all the different sectors and get them to focus their eyes on what’s possible, and that’s the best way to bring people together.
When asked if it’s possible to learn how to change the world, Bornstein emphatically agrees, Bornstein uses Childline, a 24-hour emergency response system for children in distress as an example. Childline has grown from its first office in Bombay in 1996 to 55 Indian cities today, and efforts are now underway to develop the model in Africa and other locations.
“Can we change the world? Can we learn how to change the world?” Bornstein answers, “There are hundreds and hundreds of examples of systems people have developed around the world that don’t require the entrepreneur any more because they’ve been systematized, and they’ve been spread to different locations and implemented by different people who are not the original founders--so you know that this idea, or model, is sound; it works. We can accelerate social innovation considerably by making concerted efforts to look for and analyze these ‘blueprints’ and then build communication channels to disseminate them far and wide.”
1 These statistics come from How to Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 4-5.
2 This definition of the social entrepreneur is taken from How to Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 1.
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