On my return and during my trip I was asked a few times what I meant by Social Entrepreneurship (SE). My standard answer was that SE means a lot of different things to different people, but at Wooster it is: “the process of creative thinking, innovation, risk-taking, and analysis that creates opportunities with sustainable social and economic value.” The program goals are simple: To expose students, faculty staff and client organizations to the process of social entrepreneurship through experiential learning, to encourage innovation and analysis in the social sector and other organizations that have a social mission at their core. Operationally, we have achieved these goals only modestly by providing student research teams in a structured consulting internships to over 15 social sector client organizations. In this way, since 2005 we have exposed over 75 students, faculty and staff to SE.
Now all this is fine, but I keep getting the following two questions. This post is a very brief and tentative stab at a response.
Question 1: Since, India has your idea of SE changed?
Answer: Yes! Our exposure to the organizations in India reinforced an idea we had early on but not managed to pin-down. Many of the organizations and individuals we met are already recognized social entrepreneurs (Maya Organic, Dream and Dream and Enable India among others). Our program is not going to make these organizations more entrepreneurial! In fact, by exposing our students and faculty to these organizations, we hope to learn from them. When we work with entrepreneurial social sector organizations, the program will provide students a structured internship where we use entrepreneurship principles to solve a problem. Our remaining core competency is a willingness to conduct research and consult with them on a question whose solution will be innovative. This means we have to move beyond writing business plans to being able to research broad questions and write any plan of action.
The SE program at the College of Wooster was founded on the idea that the non-profit sector needs to be just as entrepreneurial as the for-profit sector. The way in which the SE program interpreted this was: “student would write business plans for non-profits that would allow these organizations to start businesses”. Training students to be entrepreneurial by writing business plans is a very narrow interpretation and we are seeking to broaden it. If we are about entrepreneurship in the social sector, we should be thinking about business processes such as marketing and branding, cost containment, venture capital, incubation, assessment of social outcomes, enhanced mission delivery as possible places our students can learn about being entrepreneurial. We should also think about studying different types of social entrepreneurs the world over. This means that our program and curriculum has to evolve to include live case studies and classes that give students exposure to the regional and global problems that social entrepreneurs are taking on. Recent efforts like the Global HIV course are good examples of how we can start this kind of endeavor. We begin with a problem, we understand it from a multi-disciplinary lens, and we look at innovative solutions around the world. Then, as a community of learners, we try to engage with the change agents that are providing these solutions to understand and help them innovate some more.
In order to do this, we will have to think carefully about the skills that we need to build in our students to prepare them for such an opportunity. I remain confident that our exposure to these organizations has encouraged us to innovate within the program and to think about our connection to the rest of the curriculum.
In the next year or so I hope to put together a group of like-minded individuals on Wooster’s campus and externally to work out how we are going to do this.
Question 2: “Is social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship in the social sector or is it profit seeking activities that have a social outcome?”
Answer: One thing that cannot be denied is both are needed if we are to solve social problems. The SE program at the College of Wooster was founded on the idea that we would be about entrepreneurship applied to the non-profit sector. The way in which the SE program interpreted this was students wrote business plans for non-profits that would allow these organizations to start businesses. A local example is Friendtique which donates its profits to Wayne County Hospice. Another national example is Goodwill.
In the past few years, with the publication of Prahalad’s The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, some people have suggested that social entrepreneurship can include for-profit firms that also have a social impact. Examples of this range from corporate social responsibility models to bottom of the pyramid (BOP) experiments like Hindustan Lever in India. I, for one, am excited about the latter. If a cultural change is possible; If for-profit corporations can bring social considerations to the heart of their mission and begin and end any endeavor by asking the question about the social impact, we would have a unique and progressive form of capitalism that can do a lot to remedy the wrongs of past. (Noreena Hertz calls this “The New Co-op Capitalism”). That said, I am sensitive to those that argue that BOP marketing is not social entrepreneurship. I am yet to be convinced it is not. It may be a lesser form on the SE value chain, but I think for corporations that ask the social question they are taking a step in the right direction.
I think in the next year or two we will explore this question in more detail. The academic literature on it however grows by the day.
