Steve Shu's 21Publish Blog

Social Entrepreneurship. This is a term I have never heard of before until last month. I must be living in a shell. I'm still not quite sure what the term "social entrepreneur" means, but I believe it is a fairly widely used term that refers to adopting entrepreneurial behaviors in non-profit organizations.

Here's some other definitions when Googling the web:

• "The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry." (source: Ashoka)
• Social entrepreneurship "Describes an approach to a social issue.  It is not a field of discipline that can be learned in academia ... More related to leadership than to management." (source: The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship)

Now there are a number of business schools (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU Stern, Stanford ... don't currently see my alma mater Chicago or locally SMU off-the-cuff) and capital market players (e.g., venture firms) that seem to play in social entrepreneurship area.

Here's an interesting snip about RISE, a project launched in 2002 at the Columbia Business School:

RISE deepens learning opportunities for students and practitioners by focusing on key issues in current practice of social enterprise, social investing and social venturing. RISE concentrates on people working where the lines of previously distinct nonprofit and for-profit sectors start to blur ...

RISE studies the growing practice of building profit and nonprofit ventures that aim to achieve social and financial impact through their products, services and other business practices, and the entities that fund them. RISE explores issues of nonprofit organizations building capacity and using business practices to sustain their growth, as well as issues for for-profit companies trying to achieve social impacts as well as financial returns. RISE works collaboratively with investment funds around the country as well as foundations, other universities and intermediary groups to define, explore and report on key issues of interest to this developing field.

When I begin to think about some of my micro experiences with non-profits, as well as the more macro economics surrounding the space where:

• approximately half of the workers in non-profits are employed
• half are unpaid volunteers non-profit sector is approximately 7% of the the United States GDP (note: numbers not confirmed)

... well it makes me pause to think about how non-profits can leverage up to use technologies and improve work communication and collaboration, especially since direct control of resources is not as easy as it is in for-profits. eGroups and the like may be the ways of the past. Affordable community publishing, blogging communities and the like (such as the ones developing here, here, and experimented with here by Doug) provide just a preview of good things to come. The people working the communities I've cited are visionaries and leaders.