Social Entrepreneurship - Current Practice

Current Practice

One well-known contemporary social entrepreneur is Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The work of Yunus and Grameen echoes a theme among modern day social entrepreneurs that emphasizes the enormous synergies and benefits when business principles are unified with social ventures. In some countries - including Bangladesh - social entrepreneurs have filled the spaces left by a relatively small state. In other countries - particularly in Europe and South America - they have tended to work more closely with public organizations at both the national and local level.

Today, nonprofits and non-governmental organizations, foundations, governments, and individuals also play the role to promote, fund, and advise social entrepreneurs around the planet. A growing number of colleges and universities are establishing programs focused on educating and training social entrepreneurs.

The George Foundation's Women's Empowerment program empowers women by providing education, cooperative farming, vocational training, savings planning, and business development. In 2006 the cooperative farming program, Baldev Farms, was the second largest banana grower in South India with 250 acres (1.0 km2) under cultivation. Profits from the farm are used for improving the economic status of the workers and for running the other charitable activities of the foundation.

Some have created for-profit and for-a-difference organizations. A recent example is Vikram Akula, the McKinsey alumnus who started a microlending venture, SKS Microfinance, in villages of Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Although this venture is for profit, it has initiated a sharp social change amongst poor women from villages. Other examples of social entrepreneurs in Healthcare in India is Ramanujan Bose Awardee Dr Akash S Rajpal, Founder of Ekohealth has been working in India in the field of healthcare against Fee splitting and creating a unique ethical facilitation and aggregation services for healthcare providers and price comparison services for patients and help them reduce health care costs.

There are continuing arguments over precisely who counts as a social entrepreneur. The lack of consensus on the definition of social entrepreneurship means that other disciplines are often confused with and mistakenly associated with social entrepreneurship. Philanthropists, social activists, environmentalists, and other socially-oriented practitioners are referred to as social entrepreneurs. It is important to set the function of social entrepreneurship apart from other socially oriented activities and identify the boundaries within which social entrepreneurs operate. Some have advocated restricting the term to founders of organizations that primarily rely on earned income – meaning income earned directly from paying consumers. Others have extended this to include contracted work for public authorities, while still others include grants and donations. This argument is unlikely to be resolved soon. Peter Drucker, for example, once wrote that there was nothing so entrepreneurial as creating a new university: yet in most developed countries the majority of university funding comes from the state.

Organizations such as Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, the Skoll Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Athgo, New Profit Inc., National Social Entrepreneurship Forum, and Echoing Green among others, focus on highlighting these hidden change-makers who are scattered throughout the world. Ashoka's Changemakers "open sourcing social solutions" initiative Changemakers uses an online platform for what it calls collaborative competitions to build communities of practice around pressing issues.

The North American organizations tend to have a strongly individualistic stance focused on a handful of exceptional leaders, while others in Asia and Europe emphasize more how social entrepreneurs work within teams, networks, and movements for change. The Skoll Foundation, created by eBay's first president, Jeff Skoll, makes capacity-building "mezzanine level" grants to social entrepreneurial organizations that already have reached a certain level of impact, connects them through the annual Skoll World Forum and Social Edge, the Foundation's online community, and highlights their work through partnerships with the Sundance Institute, Frontline World, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and other film and broadcast outlets. Skoll also supports the field of social entrepreneurship, including through Skoll's founding of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School at Oxford University. Examples of social entrepreneurial business in the USA include NIKA Water Company, which sells bottled water in the USA and uses 100% of its profits to bring clean water to those in the developing world, as well as Newman's Own which donates 100% of its profits to support various educational charities.

Youth social entrepreneurship is an increasingly common approach to engaging youth voice in solving social problems. Youth organizations and programs promote these efforts through a variety of incentives to young people. One such program is Young Social Pioneers, which invests in the power and promise of Australia's young leaders. The program, which is an initiative of The Foundation for Young Australians, strengthens, supports and celebrates the role of young people in creating positive change in their communities.

Fast Company Magazine annually publishes a list of the twenty-five best social entrepreneurs, which the magazine defines as organizations "using the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems." In 2009, BusinessWeek followed suit, publishing a review of America's twenty-five most promising social entrepreneurs, defined as "enterprising individuals who apply business practices to solving societal problems."

The internet and social networking websites have been pivotal resources for the success and collaboration of many Social Entrepreneurs. Captain Edward Zellem of www.AfghanProverbs.com has been working with Film Annex's Afghan Development project as an example individual social entrepreneurship that merges his work with the study of languages and culture into the film platform at Film Annex. These media allow ideas to be heard by broader audiences, help networks and investors to develop globally, and achieve their goals with little or no start-up capital. The US-based nonprofit Zidisha leverages the recent spread of internet and mobile technologies in developing technologies to provide an eBay-style microlending platform where disadvantaged individuals in developing countries can interact directly with individual "peer-to-peer" lenders worldwide, sourcing small business loans at lower cost than has ever before been possible in most developing countries. In addition the internet allows for the pooling of design resources using open source principles. For example, the rise of open-source appropriate technology as a sustainable development paradigm enables people all over the world to collaborate on solving local problems just as open source software development leverages collaboration.