Social entrepreneurship

Meaning
Social entrepreneurship is the work of social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to achieve social change

 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.

 Business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return. Social entrepreneur focuses on creating social returns. Thus, the main aim of social entrepreneurship is to further social and environmental goals. Social entrepreneurs are most commonly associated with the voluntary and not-forprofit sectors

 Youth social entrepreneurship is an increasingly common approach to engaging youth voice in solving social problems. Youth organizations and programs promote these efforts through a variety of incentives to young people. One such program is Young Social Pioneers, which invests in the power and promise of Australia's young leaders. The program, which is an initiative of The Foundation for Young Australians, strengthens, supports and celebrates the role of young people in creating positive change in their communities.

Example of Social Enterprises:

Aravind Eye Hospital & Aurolab Social Entrepreneur: Dr.Govindappa Venkataswamy (Dr. V) & David Green Type of Organization: Trust Mission: Making medical technology and health care services accessible, affordable and financially selfsustaining Founded in 1976 by Dr. G. Venkataswamy, Aravind Eye Care System today is the largest and most productive eye care facility in the world. From April 2007 to March 2008, about 2.4 million persons have received outpatient eye care and over 285,000 have undergone eye surgeries at the Aravind Eye hospital.

Setting strategies for social entrepreneurs

Good strategy for any organization starts with defining appropriate goals The fundamental goal of a for-profit company is superior long term return on investment Growth is good only if superiority in ROIC is achieved and sustained Profitability must be measured realistically, capturing the actual profit for each business compared to the full investment

The Goals of Social Enterprise

The fundamental purpose of a social enterprise or any other organization is value creation For social enterprises, there are often multiple social benefits, which can lead to multiple goals Measuring full costs is essential to insure that true value is being created
Cost on a per recipient basis should always be estimated

Defining Social Benefits

Considerations
Costs avoided by society Intrinsic value of the social service Filling gaps left by government or business Uniqueness of service versus other institutions. Cost of achieving the service versus alternative means Willingness to pay by users government or other organizations.

Benefits
Ability to bring about positive change to people and communities can be enormously satisfying and provide a means of making a living. Other benefit of running a social enterprise can be in providing employment for local people. Removing the barriers to work within the limitations of a traditional working environment and offer a more flexible approach to work.

Challenges
Social enterprises have to compete in the commercial market and face the same challenges and risks as all businesses. The commercial assumption. A strong bias exists in favor of commercial approaches to addressing social problems. Its great to exploit market opportunities to make innovations more financially sustainable and/or create new economic opportunities for the poor, but often public or private

 Poor economies of scale. Too often aspiring (and usually young) social entrepreneurs assume they need to start their own organization vs. partner with an existing one. This results in the need to raise unrestricted revenue to build infrastructure bookkeeping/accounting, program evaluation, information systems, etc. albeit with poor economies of scale. Energy and resources get diverted from problem solving to organization building.

 Ignoring current efforts. There is no shortage of nonprofits doing very innovative things that nonetheless fail to be recognized, perhaps because they lack a charismatic leader and/or partners who champion and market the innovations. I hear about and interact with organizations in developing countries with very innovative ideas that routinely go unheard.

Lack of evidence. Many social entrepreneurial ideas are largely untested. Its great that these ideas represent new approaches to tackling social problems, but promotion of these ideas tends to be far out in advance of sufficient evidence that they merit promotion as the next big thing.

 Lack of an ethical framework. Its hard to imagine any social entrepreneur who would say that social and economic justice and human rights are unimportant. However, in addition to elevating the individual, the attention given to social entrepreneurship celebrates the ideas (i.e. the means) and not the commitments (i.e. the ends). As such, the focus is on entrepreneurship as a desired activity or way of being, not as a tool (among other tools such as political advocacy and grassroots organizing) to be used to advance human rights