Please note that some names have been changed to protect the identity of certain members of the community in Bromley-by-Bow.

The term ‘social entrepreneur’ first appeared in the UK in an article in the Independent in June 1995 referring to me and my colleague Adele Blakebrough. We were part of the small group of individuals who founded the social entrepreneur movement in the United Kingdom, before we even had a term to describe who we were and what we did. Nowadays, the term ‘social entrepreneur’ is frequently bandied about and I fear it is in danger of coming to mean different things to different people. I want to shed light on what social entrepreneurship is all about and who social entrepreneurs are – to lay out what sets apart this entrepreneurial way of working from what has gone before and show how it challenges many of our current assumptions about the provision of public services within Western democracies. I do not want to develop such a tight definition that all creativity is precluded – indeed, creativity lies at the very heart of any definition of the term – but I do want to make a clear distinction between the traditional approach of the state and charitable sectors on the one hand and the approach of people with a more entrepreneurial mindset on the other.

I want to show how we might all embrace this new way of working. Because this is a genuine attempt to get to the heart of a serious problem I will have to tell some uncomfortable truths along the way. If human creativity and a commitment to changing the world remains at the core of social entrepreneurship, people’s aspirations for social change can be turned into realistic, practical action on the ground in their neighbourhoods, on their streets. It truly does make a difference.

In my own work, I have quite consciously gone into failing situations to shake things up. This immediately stands me apart from the crowd and draws attention to my message. In this way I have found that I can quickly draw kindred spirits to my campaign. This approach is far more effective when building a team than placing a Guardian advert. Playing the enfant terrible is in fact very purposeful. It can really bring a situation to life and remind people that nothing is actually fixed in their world, that change really is possible.

In my own tradition of the Christian church, this methodology of dissent and challenge is well known, but often overlooked. The prophet Ezekiel, for example, alone dared to suggest that all was not well within his society. Social entrepreneurs belong to this ‘left field’ tradition, representatives of which can be found in ancient and modern cultures throughout history and across the world. Time and again they are the real agents of change. The nonconformist churches in Britain, which were built in the main by dissenters, have now to a large degree been taken over by conformists who talk endlessly about ‘making poverty history’ but are not prepared to do the hard work or embrace the business logic necessary to do anything really practical and to scale about it. This is with some notable exceptions, of course, and where they exist they are often impressive. Eric Blakebrough, for example, my early mentor and a Baptist minister at that time, founded the Kaleidoscope Project in Kingston-upon-Thames to challenge the prevailing views in the sixties and seventies about drug abuse and has given a lifetime of service to this often neglected community.

Social entrepreneurs know from hard-won experience that the trick is first to demonstrate what you are proposing to do for people in a small and tangible way and then to expand the sense of possibility. What you say and do really matters to people: seeing is believing. Integrity is the name of the game. Social entrepreneurs are not being difficult for its – or their – own sake. They seek to change the ethos within which people live and work and create paradigm shifts. They seek to initiate change at a number of different levels at the same time, thus creating momentum. Jamie Oliver offered us a great example of this in his 2005 School Dinners television series. Not only did he run a very successful campaign, he also demonstrated a way of working which bought profound change to one of London’s poorest communities.

Jamie did not begin with the think tanks, committees and research documents so often favoured by civil servants and politicians. He began with the inner dynamics of a very human situation, with the head dinner lady, Nora, and her school kitchen at Kidbrooke Comprehensive in south-east London. Innovation in public service did not come via the usual processes of government: it came through building strong relationships with Nora and her team of dinner ladies, and by observing and coming to really understand the daily inner dynamics of a school kitchen. This was the ‘theatre’: together they had to write the play.

Jamie is an animator. We watched as he inspired the dinner ladies to get back in touch with the passion for food and cookery that had brought them to the school meal business in the first place. He then went further, engaging with the children and their parents, the head teacher, the local education authority, and eventually central government and the Prime Minister. Jamie Oliver almost unwittingly developed an approach to working with people which conferred on him real legitimacy. Millions of people across Britain supported him. Many of our politicians would give their right arms to have such popular backing. He became credible, of course, not because of what committees he chaired or sat on, not by whom he claimed to represent, but by what he actually did. This is the classic ‘inside-out’ approach of the social entrepreneur, which begins with people and the building blocks of human relationships.

Jamie demonstrated a way of tackling a social problem that fundamentally challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. I would wager that, had it been allowed to mature over a period of some years, it might have brought directly quantifiable change to Kidbrooke; it might have changed the social and political landscape and achieved in practice, in a poor inner-city area apparently firmly resistant to ‘change’, what New Labour and David Cameron’s Conservatives have so often talked about rhetorically but have so rarely achieved. But this was a television series, a piece of entertainment. This early innovation in school meals has now been handed back to government, to the very same structures and methodology that contributed to the problem of poor-quality food in the first place.

Government created a representative committee, the School Meals Review Panel, to take the project forward. They made recommendations. They were followed by the Schools Food Trust. They have been concerned to make this a national project but in my view this very focus on the national aims, rather than the local ones, have stopped any real innovation dead in its tracks. Yes, the food may improve in schools across the country; millions of pounds of public money will be spent to ensure it does. The chips might be replaced by sautéed potatoes, but the real possibility for innovation which Jamie Oliver’s series demonstrated – the opportunity for long-term change in a difficult inner-city area – has been lost. It was lost when government failed to grasp the implications of a more entrepreneurial, organic way of working, which enabled one person to be a change maker and did not compartmentalize human creativity. Once again, government puts its trust in and gives its backing to structures, rather than individuals.

Social entrepreneurs often defy easy definition. When you think you have them neatly placed in a box, like Houdini they find a way out – for we are, by nature, creative spirits. However, I think it is possible to identify some commonly shared principles – in particular our concern to apply business experience and business logic to social questions.

‘Learning by doing’ – this is a phrase we associate with children and childhood. I recently watched my young son struggling to put together the four pieces of a Noddy jigsaw. His first two attempts were very frustrating. There were tears and a bid to leave the room. But we persevered and on attempt number three, as if by magic, the pieces all fitted into place. Success! I came home a month later to find that he’d put together a hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle on his own. I recount the story because I think it illustrates very well a ‘can-do’ approach to tackling what seemed, to my son, to be an insurmountable problem. Had government been enlisted to help my son out with his problem, here’s what my experience tells me they’d have done: they’d have set up a committee to assess the situation, full of highly educated people who had probably never put a jigsaw together, but who knew all the theory behind it. They would spend a long time examining the pieces before writing an extensive and expensive report on their findings. They would present this to my son. They would tell him, also, that a policy paper would be forthcoming, which would explore what could be learned from his struggle to put the pieces together and what measures could be taken to ‘move forward together’. At no point would they think to simply join him, take hold of the physical pieces of the jigsaw and get stuck in and help him figure things out. Their approach would seem to value the ‘bigger picture’ more than it would value finding practical, detailed solutions to an urgent problem. The result, for my son at any rate, would be: nothing. He would be left exactly where he had been in the first place, with a lot of pieces and no idea of how to do the puzzle. He’d feel frustrated and he’d feel paralysed. Paralysis by analysis.

The ‘learning by doing’ approach is the tried and tested approach of the social entrepreneur. We call into question the systems and processes of government, which are still run by well-qualified civil servants who rarely get hold of the pieces themselves and whose approach has so failed many of our poorest communities.

What marks out social entrepreneurs from business entrepreneurs and other kinds of charitable and public-sector workers is that they are not driven solely by financial profit or ideology, or by a career or a pension scheme. Instead they are often driven by a desire to make their mark on the world. They feel they have something important to share that must be demonstrated both emotionally and practically. In my experience they care a lot about people and are talented at forming relationships and creating committed teams and communities around them. They are very serious about learning from, and applying business experience and ideas to, social questions. They are fundamentally interested in what works in practice and how you scale up ideas to achieve effective growth. They are often not easy people to be around, particularly if you are not interested in what they are doing. They are very focused.

The Artic explorer Robert Swan, the first man to walk to both Poles, once told me that the people he chose to join him on his journey were not the suave, mild-mannered people so often favoured to run public-sector bodies: they were rough diamonds who had a real passion for their field and who, when you joined them together with the right team, were capable of getting you there and back alive, with enough to eat and still some to spare. Those are the kinds of people who make good social entrepreneurs. They are like nails: the harder you hit them, the further they go in.

Social entrepreneurs have discovered that business has a considerable amount to teach them. They like business because businesses operate in the real world: if you don’t sell your products, you go bust very quickly. The public and charitable sectors often don’t have to operate in this ‘real’ environment – they often stay safely removed, preferring to engage more with theory than practical reality, locked into a grant-dependent culture. Like social entrepreneurs, many business people are passionate, driven people who care deeply about their companies. For many, this is not simply a nine-to-five job: it can be their life’s work. Social entrepreneurs are often very serious about social innovation and leaders in the field often have sky-high aspirations; they are literally committed to changing the world.

There have clearly been other periods of social innovation in British history and some of the ideas and approaches of the social entrepreneur are not ‘new’ ones. The Victorian age famously spawned great philanthropists like William Booth, William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury and countless others who challenged the status quo in their own lifetimes and sought to draw attention to poverty in their society and its destructive effects on human lives. In Great Expectations and his other great social novels, Charles Dickens used his remarkable talents as a writer to challenge and transform people’s views and inspire compassion and action by communicating a story about the poverty and social inequality he saw around him every single day. Many of the great Victorians knew a thing or two about the more practical approaches I’ve been talking about. Great engineers like Stevenson and Brunel changed the face of Britain not through policy papers but through engaging with very practical problems over a long period of time. Samuel Lister surely changed the face of the woollen industry from his mill in my home town of Bradford, with his many ingenious patents, but he also changed the prospects, infrastructure and identity of a particular region. One member of his family business told me that officials who visited the mill when Lister was alive often complained that they could never find him in his office – he was invariably under the machinery on the shop floor, mending it or inventing a simple adjustment to make it run more efficiently. These great entrepreneurs stayed loyal to their passions and worried endlessly about the details of their projects in a never-ending drive to make things work better.

They also knew about the value of the long view. John Harrison, for example, devoted a costly lifetime’s work to his quest to calculate exact longitude. He knew this level of commitment was necessary if he wanted to understand enough of the practical detail of his art to achieve success. And, of course, the lasting impact of his clock, which saved sailors from the perils of the high seas and changed the world for ever, is beyond measure. I believe that when it comes to some of our most intractable social problems, it is time once again to identify, understand, support and reward people who take a long view and who focus on the practical details of a particular situation and place. We need to back those individuals who commit their lives to these challenging issues rather than being dazzled by fly-by-nights (be they politicians, or journalists, or charity workers) who produce many fine words but few practical solutions. It is time to embra...