Social Entrepreneurship

An Evidence-Based Approach to Creating Social Value

Chao Guo, Wolfgang Bielefeld

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118844175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Non-Profit- & gemeinnützige Organisationen

Social entrepreneurship explained

Social entrepreneurship is a hot topic in public and non-profit management. Organizations everywhere are looking for innovative ways to respond to financial, social, and regulatory pressures. The next generation of transformative leaders will be risk takers who know how to face even the biggest challenges using market-driven strategies that get results. This book contains everything students and professionals need to know about the cutting-edge practice of social entrepreneurship.

In Social Entrepreneurship, you'll learn how to read markets and environments to identify opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. Then, the authors show to convert opportunities into successful ventures: one-time initiatives, ongoing programs and new, mission-driven organizations are all covered. Sector-specific strategies and recommendations guide readers directly to the techniques that will have the biggest impact.

• Employs an evidence-based approach to help organizations achieve goals more efficiently
• Offers advice on taking advantage of new technologies and untapped resources using the most current approaches
• Written by renowned experts in the field of social entrepreneurship

Authors Guo and Bielefeld have been instrumental in advancing the study of social entrepreneurship, and they understand the trends and currents in the field. They bring readers up to date and ready them to begin implementing changes that really make a difference. In non-profits and government, leadership is already becoming synonymous with social entrepreneurship, and this book is its foundation.

Part One
Social Entrepreneurship: Concept and Context

Chapter One
The Many Faces of Social Entrepreneurship

In this chapter, we provide a survey of the many faces of social entrepreneurship, summarized as four Ws: What is social entrepreneurship? Who are the social entrepreneurs? Why social entrepreneurship? Where does it occur?

WHAT IS SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP?

The term “social entrepreneurship” was used first in the literature as early as the 1960s, but it was not until the term was adopted by Bill Drayton in the early 1980s that it began to come into widespread use. Despite a recent growth of interest in social entrepreneurship, researchers have yet to reach consensus on the definition of this emerging concept. For example, the terms “social entrepreneurship” and “social enterprise” are sometimes used interchangeably, which leads to confusion. To illustrate the variety of the understanding of the concept, we provide a sample of definitions of social entrepreneurship in Table 1.1.

Author(s), Year	Definition
Austin, Stevenson, & Wei-Skillern (2006)^3	Innovative, social value creating activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit, business, or government sectors (p. 2).
Brinckerhoff (2000)^4	Social entrepreneurs have the following characteristics: They are willing to take reasonable risk on behalf of the people their organization serves; They are constantly looking for new ways to serve their constituencies, and to add value to existing services; They understand that all resource allocations are really stewardship investments; They weigh social and financial return of each of these investments; They understand the difference between needs and wants; and They always keep the mission first, but know that without the money, there is no mission output (p. 12).
Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (2008)^5	Innovative and resourceful approaches to addressing social problems. These approaches could be pursued through for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid organizations.
Dees (1998)^6	Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector, by: adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value); recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission; engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning; acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand; exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created (p. 4).
Frumkin (2002)^7	Social entrepreneurs have a combination of the supply-side orientation and the instrumental rationale, providing a vehicle for entrepreneurship that creates enterprises that combine commercial and charitable goals (p. 130).
Light (2006a)^8	A social entrepreneur is an individual, group, network, organization, or alliance of organizations that seeks sustainable, large-scale change through pattern-breaking ideas in what governments, nonprofits, and businesses do to address significant social problems or how they do it.
Martin & Osberg (2007)^9	Social entrepreneurship has the following three components. Identifying a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve any transformative benefit on its own. Identifying an opportunity in this unjust equilibrium, developing a social value proposition, and bringing to bear inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude, thereby challenging the stable state’s hegemony. Forging a new, stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or alleviates the suffering of the targeted group, and through imitation and the creation of a stable ecosystem around the new equilibrium ensuring a better future for the targeted group and even society at large (p. 35).
Mort, Weerawardena, & Carnegie (2003)^10	Social entrepreneurs are first driven by the social mission of creating better social value than their competitors which results in them exhibiting entrepreneurially virtuous behavior. They exhibit a balanced judgment, a coherent unity of purpose, and action in the face of complexity. Social entrepreneurs explore and recognize opportunities to create better social value for their clients. Social entrepreneurs display innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk taking propensity in their key decision making process.
Peredor & McLean (2006)^11	Social entrepreneurship is exercised where a person or group: aims at creating social value, either exclusively or at least in some prominent way; shows a capacity to recognize and take advantage of opportunities to create value; employs innovation, ranging from outright invention to adapting someone else’s novelty, in creating and/or distributing social value; is willing to accept an above average degree of risk in creating and disseminating social value; and is unusually resourceful in being relatively undaunted by scarce assets in pursuing their social venture (p. 64).
Pomerantz (2003)^12	Social entrepreneurship can be defined as the development of innovative, mission-supporting, earned income, job creating or licensing ventures undertaken by individual social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, or nonprofits in association with for-profits (p. 25).
Thompson, Alvy, & Lees (2000)^13	Social entrepreneurs are people who realize where there is an opportunity to satisfy some unmet need that the state welfare will not meet, and who gather together the necessary resources (generally people, often volunteers, money, and premises) and use these to “make a difference” (p. 328).
Young (1986)^14	Nonprofit entrepreneurs are the innovators who found new organizations, develop and implement new programs and methods, organize and expand new services, and redirect the activities of faltering organizations (p. 162).

Table 1.1 Definitions of Social Entrepreneurship

The wide variety of existing definitions can be roughly categorized as broad and narrow. A narrow definition of social entrepreneurship refers mainly to earned-income strategies for nonprofit organizations,¹ or what Dees and Anderson call the “social enterprise” school of thought.² Enterprise, as the name suggests, is the main topic of concern in the social enterprise school of thought. It is defined as an entrepreneurial, nonprofit project that helps generate revenue as well as serve the society. This perspective focuses on producing income flows other than collecting revenue from grants and subsidies. Also, it endorses the scheme of business techniques to improve the working of nonprofits in order to make them more entrepreneurial. Social enterprise school has a commercial knowledge foundation similar to the social innovation school. The social enterprise school is rooted in commercial entrepreneurship practic...