Becoming a Social Entrepreneur

Starting Out, Scaling Up and Staying True

Michael Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516337
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

What's it like to be a social entrepreneur – not a textbook social entrepreneur but one on the ground? This book offers an explanation. Michael Gordon, leading Social Entrepreneurship expert from the University of Michigan, spoke with more than one hundred social entrepreneurs – from six continents, young and old, just starting out to several decades in, addressing seemingly every societal problem of the day.

This book uses their words and experiences to provide a kaleidoscopic description of what it means to become a social entrepreneur. It ranges from the personal and emotional challenges they often face to the grand impact many hope to produce. It touches on the sublime but focuses on the everyday, highlighting the mistakes that have been made, the lessons learned and, especially, what advice they would give to those wanting to start a social venture.

This book presents the truth, not the varnish, and is ideal for use in the classroom with students studying social entrepreneurship, and for all new and experienced social entrepreneurs seeking real-life examples of how to overcome challenges. For anyone else, it offers a penetrating portrait of the lives of those committed to changing the world.

Part 1

Before you

Social entrepreneurs have come before you, as others will follow. None can equip you for all the challenges on your journey. But they’ve seen the terrain. Listen.

Listen when they tell you to learn from the past, but be critical of received wisdom.

Examine your efforts. Are you “mission-first?” Do you have an appropriate relationship to profit and markets? Are you aiming high enough?

Are you a social entrepreneur ?

1 Lessons to learn

Becoming an effective social entrepreneur, as with most worthwhile endeavors, requires learning: from history, from others, and from the results you produce. Learning also requires critically examining, experimenting; not leaping to accept others’ beliefs; and recognizing that the circle of learning you draw from must include many people you may never have suspected could be your teachers.

Sanga’s birthday

Sanga Moses doesn’t celebrate his birthday because he doesn’t know exactly when he was born. “I have something in my passport, which is 30 January 1982, but that was a collaborative birth date. I didn’t choose it alone. I chose it with my class. It’s a long story.”

Growing up in Uganda in extreme poverty, raised early on by a depressed, homeless father, and never knowing his mother until he was 15, Sanga is an unlikely social entrepreneur. Landmarks along his route out of poverty include owning his first pair of shoes at age 13; receiving a university degree in Kampala, the capital city; and working his way to a corner office as an accountant in the banking world. And now, he has ambitions to transform the lives of, and preserve the environment for, other Africans like himself.

Wise far beyond his years, Sanga tells me:

What I’ve learned is that there are two most important friends you can have: friends who have succeeded and friends who people call failures. People who have, in the eyes of the world, failed have some lessons. They have maybe done some wrong things and they know what to avoid, and those can be very good lessons to help you know what to avoid. And friends who have succeeded can also tell you a few things about what really works, maybe. So having both friends is really important.

The friends you’ll meet in this book are of both sorts, the truth being that most exhibit traits of each. As Sanga makes clear, it is not only those who are successful by traditional definitions that are worth listening to.

Lessons left on the ground

KickStart International has lifted well over one million rural Africans out of poverty by creating and selling technology appropriate to its context. The company’s former name, ApproTEC, made this explicit. Crucially, technology that is appropriate for poor farmers with small plots of land should be that which helps them make money; but this alone, as KickStart discovered, is not enough.

Martin Fisher, an engineer with a PhD from Stanford, and Nick Moon, a carpenter with interests in music, co-founded ApproTEC in 1991. A few years earlier, the appropriate technology movement had been declared dead. The idea behind the movement was sound: to help the poor in the developing world by deploying technologies that create jobs that require labor, not more efficient technologies that eliminate them. Because more than three-quarters of Africa’s poor depend on farming, it was natural that many of these tools, too, should support farming. KickStart’s best-known technology resembles a basic stair-stepper found in many health clubs, but it is used for drawing water out of the ground to irrigate small farms, not for a cardio workout or toning your abs.

While the appropriate technology movement was built on the idea of supporting economic development via productive, local labor, those who tried to put it into practice led it to its grave by overlooking many key issues. Martin and Nick took these issues to heart and resuscitated the movement via ApproTEC. For instance, they realized that technologies that support rural famers might be simple, but they must also consistently be of high-quality, durable, easily maintained, and easily repaired. Also, for all the apparent appeal of giving away technology to communities in need, their experience told them that the best way to get people to take full advantage of money-making technologies was to get them to buy them; they would then be valued as prized (and expensive) possessions.

Fisher laments the lack of understanding by the original practitioners of the appropriate technology movement.

It’s interesting to watch the 30-year cycles in development. When I first went to Kenya in 1985, I was at the very tail end of the appropriate technology movement, which started with E.F. Schumacher’s book, Small is Beautiful. ¹ Everybody got very excited. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on appropriate technology. By 1985, basically it was dead in the water. Everybody said, ‘It didn’t work; we’re not interested in technology; it wasn’t the solution.’

Although by his own reckoning he claims he’s “just a dumb engineer,” Martin thought there might be a place for it.

So I spent the next five or six years making a lot of mistakes about [economic] development, working for ActionAid and learning a lot of lessons about what doesn’t work – but also looking back on the appropriate technology movement and sort of analyzing why that went wrong. And there was a huge number of reasons it went wrong, and, in retrospect, every mistake they could have made, they made.

Despite KickStart’s success, others entered the technology arena and those mistakes are still being made.

Those lessons have not been learned. Negative lessons in development are never learned. So now I’ve been watching this new movement in appropriate technology. They call it ‘technology,’ they call it whatever. Very, very many of those same lessons we learned are about failures, and things people [always did] wrong are being repeated.

In its over two decades of operation KickStart has developed a keen understanding of the rural poor, how to develop markets for new products, and how to build lasting supply chains – among other insights. Such lessons – both on what works and what doesn’t – will be shared as we delve into the customs and practices of social entrepreneurship.

Note

1Schumacher, E.F., Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973).

2 Are you a social entrepreneur?

Social entrepreneurs find a way to harness the forces of business, but their focus is first on societal good and then on financial gain, profit, and money more generally – mainly as a means of achieving societal good. At least that is a sentiment most social entrepreneurs would subscribe to.

Social entrepreneurs’ complicated relationship with markets is evidenced by a desire to allow supply and demand to spread social interventions widely and efficiently even while recognizing, as many do, that, too often, market mechanisms alone are not up to the task. This creates a spectrum of social entrepreneurship, with markets and profit being employed to different degrees, those societal problems that are the most intractable typically resisting pure market approaches. Along this spectrum lies a diverse array of social entrepreneurs, including some who do not even warrant the label and others with the requisite bona fides who have never stopped to look in the mirror.

A new wave

Stripped of all exceptions, a description of a social entrepreneur might read something like this: idealistic, passionate, focused, committed to a better world, skillful. And young – for social entrepreneurship carries with it an air of promise, vitality, and the new.

No one I interviewed exemplifies this more than Noor Siddiqui, just 18 years old when we spoke, but in possession of an accelerated wisdom bolstered by a Thiel Fellowship. Starting in 2011, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has granted 20 teenagers a year a $100,000 ¹ stipend (each, over 2 years) not to go to college and instead to focus on entrepreneurship. In addition to the lavish funding, the chosen fellows move to Silicon Valley and are mentored by luminaries in the areas of entrepreneurship and supporting activities, including venture capital.

Fellows are selected based on their potential to make entrepreneurial breakthroughs rather than any ideas they might have before beginning their fellowship. Noor’s first idea as a fellow was to advance the concept of microwork. Her project, WorkShare, offered employment opportunities for those not fulfilling their economic potential. As an example of a microwork opportunity, many firms need audio files transcribed to text for more convenient use: these audio files may be legal depositions, conference calls, webinars, or any of a large variety of other content. WorkShare’s aim was to contract with these firms and also to establish partnerships in base-of-the-pyramid (very low-income, developing-world) locales so that under-employed college students could produce the transcriptions for an attractive wage. Noor recognizes that her efforts would fail to reach those at the very bottom of the economic pyramid, the so-called “bottom billion”: ²

At the beginning of my fellowship, I was targeting the bottom billion, but … realized that the people who I’m targeting had to be at the base-of-the-pyramid … not the [very] bottom billion … That is where [aid] needs to go. That’s sort of like the sector of society that has been most neglected. …

Business for the most part can’t reach the bottom billion, [but] a lot of businesses are doing interesting experiments with clean water distribution, trash pickup and things like that where they have reached the bottom billion. But, there are still 3 billion people at the base-of-the-pyramid. That’s definitely a place where businesses should be making things more efficient and create more wealth.

Noor speaks to the tradeoffs between social entrepreneurship and ordinary entrepreneurship:

If really talented people were getting the opportunity to make a lot of money saving the world, I think they’d prefer to do that. But now there’s sort of a paradox, a false dichotomy put in place [based on] whether you want to do well for yourself personally or whether you want to do well for the world. I think that people need to understand that.

Right now I’m seeing that the sweet spot between high impact and high profitability is a very small, very narrow type of business, and if the scope of that could become larger where high impact could mean high profitability in more areas, then I don’t think we’d have to live with poverty anymore.

From the sweet spot toward profit

Being in the sweet spot where impact meets profit eliminates dueling incentives. Much more often, however, a social entrepreneur must move noticeably toward one of the extremes. Tacking toward profit makes a social enterprise more closely resemble an ordinary business. Some even argue that there is a false distinction between social enterprises and business in general, or certainly a blurry one. Cheryl Heller falls into this camp.

Cheryl has worked with small and large socially minded organizations in a variety of capacities. She founded the first Master’s Program in Social Design at the School of Visu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface: Listening to social entrepreneurs
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Before you
• PART 2 You
• PART 3 Your team
• PART 4 Your business model
• PART 5 Running your business
• PART 6 More than you: Impact
• PART 7 Beyond you
• Appendix 1: Methodology
• Appendix 2: The entrepreneurs and the organizations
• Index