Social Entrepreneurship

Social Entrepreneurship is an entrepreneurial venture with a strong community-oriented mission: examples include micro-financing or technologies for clean water in rural areas. The field has grown very quickly over the past few years, and has merged with the technology sector incredibly, with most social ventures considered unpractical if they do not leverage technology to create scale. The term has become increasingly popular on campuses and also informs the strategy of several prominent social sector organizations, including Ashoka and the Schwab and Skoll Foundation foundations.

Though there is a lot that is inherently appealing about social entrepreneurs and the stories of why and how they do what they do, this field transcends the phenomenon of popularity and fascination with people. It signals the desire to drive social change in communities with large disparities, and it is that potential payoff, with its lasting, transformational benefit to society, that sets the field and its practitioners apart. The lack of a formal definition of the field has arguably made the field so inclusive that  it now has an immense umbrella under which all manner of socially beneficial activities fit.

S0 what distinguishes social entrepreneurship from its for-profit cousin? First, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the most useful and informative way to define social entrepreneurship is to establish its congruence with entrepreneurship, seeing social entrepreneurship as grounded in these same three elements - entrepreneurial context, characteristics and outcomes. "Both the entrepreneur and the social entrepreneur are strongly motivated by the opportunity they identify, pursuing that vision relentlessly, and deriving considerable psychic reward from the process of realizing their ideas." (SSIR)

The critical difference between social entrepreneurship and regular entrepreneurship lies in value proposition - whereas a regular entrepreneur the value proposition revolves around serving markets that can comfortably afford the product or service being offered for a financial profit, the social entrepreneur neither expects nor organizes his venture around the delivery of profits; the social entrepreneur’s value proposition targets an neglected and disadvantaged segment of the population that can not afford nor can it advocate to achieve the transformative benefit on its own.