Social Entepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is closely related to welfare because social welfare emerges when creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship are developed together… creating a ‘cluster of value’ that appears when several value chains are bundled together, thus resulting in increased employment. 

Social entrepreneurship is all about recognizing social problems and achieving a social change by employing entrepreneurial principles, processes, and operations. It is also, about performing research to completely define a particular social problem and then organizing, creating, and managing a social venture to attain the desired change. The change may or may not include a thorough elimination of a social problem. It may be a lifetime process focusing on the improvement of existing circumstances.

In addition, there are numerous organizations like this operating worldwide, known as social enterprises. A social enterprise is just like any other business. However, what makes it a business on a human scale is the way that its profit is used. Usually, the profit is used to fulfill a social mission.

Social enterprises do not exist to grow the wealth of its investors or shareholders. On the contrary, they exist to contribute to social equality and improve peoples’ living conditions. Generated profit is reinvested in the business or in achieving social goals like job creation, meeting cultural needs, healthcare and preservation of the environment.

But, does social entrepreneurship and do social enterprises (SEE) really solve our systemic social problems?

Over the last decade, business schools and investors have been paying more attention to social entrepreneurs, Especially those who create ventures with the primary goal of achieving positive social change.

But most people encounter the field only through its most prominent cases—typically visionaries who have built national or global organizations that have achieved great social impact.

This focus on success stories has led to a skewed view of social entrepreneurship as nothing more or less than a field of huge, realized dreams.

According to Stanford Social Innovation Review ( 2018), “SEE’s rise distracts from and undermines the critical role of an organized citizenry, political action, and democratic government in achieving systemic social change, by offering itself as a private, market-based alternative. SEE is founded on “neoliberal” ideology: a belief that markets, not governments, produce the best social and economic outcomes. SEE advocates construct social problems as ‘knowledge’ problems that can be solved by technical innovation that is driven by competition among individual social entrepreneurs, operating through for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid enterprises.”

Are SEE’s really endangering the governments and the political scene, or they actually helping them? Imagine what would happen if these two join forces.