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When Is an Entrepreneur a Social Entrepreneur?
While you can’t find it in the dictionary, social entrepreneurship has become a familiar term in the last 10 years. A Lexis-Nexis search for social entrepreneur produced six stories in 1991 and 433 in 2001.1
But what is a social entrepreneur? Different people have different answers.
People like Jerr Boschee and organizations like the Institute for Social Entrepreneurs focus on the financial aspect, defining a social entrepreneur as “individual who uses earned income strategies to pursue social objectives, simultaneously seeking both a financial and social return on investment” and social entrepreneurship as the “art of simultaneously pursuing both a financial and a social return on investment.”2
People like Bill Drayton and David Bornstein and organizations like Ashoka take a broader, arguably more abstract point of view. Bornstein sees social entrepreneurs as “transformative forces: people with new ideas to address major problems who are relentless in the pursuit of their visions….”3 Extending a common metaphor, Ashoka characterizes social entrepreneurs as people who “are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.”4
Revolutionary and transformative characteristics aren’t unique to social entrepreneurs, though. What distinguishes social entrepreneur from an entrepreneur, in general?
In his book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David Bornstein writes, “It is meaningless to talk about social entrepreneurs without considering the ethical quality of their motivation: the why. In the end, business and social entrepreneurs are very much the same animals. They think about problems the same way. They ask the same types of questions. The difference is not in temperament or ability, but in the nature of their visions. In a question: Does the entrepreneur dream of building the world’s greatest running-shoe company or vaccinating all the world’s children?”
No matter how you define them, social entrepreneurs play an important role in society, and although they are perhaps more prevalent in the nonprofit sector, they are by no means exclusively found there.
Given their importance in driving social change and improving the world, we decided to focus this Sophist on social entrepreneurs. In “How to Change the World: Can Social Entrepreneurship Be Taught?,“ an interview with author David Bornstein on the topics covered in How to Change the World reveals both lessons learned and to be taught on the subject of entrepreneurship.
Developing some themes mentioned here in the editors’ note, the second article in this issue considers whether Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are social entrepreneurs. To find out if they are or aren’t, you’ll have to read “A Look at Google: Billion-dollar Social Entrepreneurship?”
In keeping with the theme of social entrepreneurship, "Monolog" features Beth Anderson, managing director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. “In Brief” highlights some Web resources focused on social entrepreneurship, in addition to including some information on upcoming nonprofit conferences.
We hope the possibilities for the ideas championed by social entrepreneurs inspire you as they did us as we put together this issue of The Sophist.
The Editors
1 From How to Change the World by David Bornstein (Oxford University Press, 2004).
2 This definition comes from a glossary available from the Institute for Social Entrepreneurs at http://www.socialent.org/pdfs/GLOSSARY.pdf.
3 From How to Change the World by David Bornstein (Oxford University Press, 2004).
4 This description comes from “What Is a Social Entrepreneur?” at http://www.ashoka.org/fellows/social_entrepreneur.cfm.
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