When we think of entrepreneurs, we usually picture daring individuals who are willing to put everything into a great idea and build a successful business. We tend to think of entrepreneurs as people who are shaping industry and making large profits. However, there’s a new kind of entrepreneurship that’s shifting that definition: social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurs create innovative solutions to social problems.
While business entrepreneurs are usually aiming to change the market and bring in profits, social entrepreneurs are looking to change the world and create positive social change. They have broad goals related to poverty, hunger, the environment, health, culture, and social rights. Because they’re building on innovative ideas and bringing in public interest, social entrepreneurs are effectively creating social change on a grand scale.
There are a number of different kinds of social entrepreneurship. There are non-profit social entrepreneur organizations, aiming to use a new innovation to address a social problem. These organizations usually depend on some outside philanthropic support.
There are also hybrid non-profit organizations. While not striving to make an overall profit, these organizations generally sell some products to recover at least a portion of their costs. Often they sell products to customers in more developed communities in order to assist people in poorer and more marginalized communities.
The final category is a social business venture. These businesses do seek to make a profit, but their primary goal is to maximize their outreach and help as many people as possible. These different kinds of organizations exist on different scales. Some organizations aim to address an important need within one community. Others are trying to enact change on a global scale.
There are a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurial organizations. One such person is Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Grameen Bank is a microfinance organization that grants small loans to impoverished individuals without requiring collateral. The bank aims to support individuals who have been historically under-served, and approximately 96% of its borrowers are women. The small loans allow borrowers to improve their own situation and that of their communities. The bank is founded on one of the core beliefs of social entrepreneurship: that disadvantaged individuals have valuable skills and ideas, and the best way of enacting lasting change is by enabling them to help themselves.
Kiva is another organization built on this model that, instead of inviting charitable-minded individuals to make donations, asks them to make microloans to people around the world who need them to build businesses, fund education, and develop agriculture. One of the most famous examples of a social business venture is TOMS Shoes, a for-profit company that uses a share of its income to provide shoes for impoverished children. These organizations and many others have proven that social entrepreneurship can be an extremely successful model for social change.
Conclusion on social entrepreneurship
Social entrepreneurship has been able to use the internet and social networking very effectively. It allows people around the world to communicate, facilitating collaboration across borders to address global problems. It also allows social entrepreneurs to reach a very wide audience. Social networking in particular allows entrepreneurs to pool resources and ideas. Crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter enable entrepreneurs to find the resources they need get their ideas off the ground as quickly as possible.
This kind of technology is opening the doors to more and more social entrepreneurs. Today, if you have a great idea that can help people and improve the world, whether it’s for your local community or the whole planet, it’s getting easier and easier to turn that idea into reality.
And Steemit? Hopefully, this platform will help to bootstrap some more good businesses.
What is your opinion? Do you have any favorite social business?
