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Social entrepreneurs go mainstream

Never let a crisis go to waste. Social entrepreneurs take this economic upheaval to be a blessing, providing a chance for business to transition from an anonymous, complex system to one that is direct and transparent.

'Social entrepreneurs are the role models, the mass disrupters and the mass recruiters of local change-makers.' —Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka

Photo: Yusuke Abe

The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Saïd Business School is a leader in the field. "Young people are really fascinated with the idea of combining their values with making money," says Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School in New York City. "It's not just about padding pockets for them. They want to go and pursue something with meaning."

That's certainly the case for Saïd Business School student Claire Williams, co-founder of Hope Runs in Kenya, which uses running and education to empower AIDS orphans. In recent months, she says, social entrepreneurship has suddenly become cool. "When you said you were a social entrepreneur in business school, people used to think you were a little too fuzzy or tree-huggy. But … social entrepreneurship isn't a cop-out. It's about creating sustainable businesses that work for the benefit of both the social good and the bottom line."

Hartigan says the new generation of social entrepreneurs—the ones with degrees in the field—are focused on making community enterprises commercially viable rather than donor-dependent and on developing academic metrics to ensure this independence. Hartigan likes to remind students that metrics aren't everything—as Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be counted"—but that it's critical to convene researchers and practitioners to establish uniform standards of accountability, governance and transparency.

This collective and businesslike spirit will be key if this approach is to succeed, says Ashoka's Drayton. "Social entrepreneurs are the role models, the mass disrupters and the mass recruiters of local change-makers. They are the ones who get thousands of people and thousands of communities to stand up and say together, 'Oh, that's a pretty good idea. I'm going to make that work here.' That's the spirit we need to infuse throughout society."

Andrew Tolve, whose entrepreneurial spirit is limited to freelance writing, wrote about district heating in the January/February 2009 issue.

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