Social Entrepreneurship

In this excellent article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, we are reminded that virtually "all entrepreneurship is social".

An excerpt.

“Over the past decade or so, the term social entrepreneur has become a fashionable way of describing individuals and organizations that, in their attempts at large-scale change, blur the traditional boundaries between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Given the ceaseless appearance of innovations and new institutional forms, we should welcome a new term that allows us to think systematically about a still-emergent field.

“One danger, however, is that the use of the modifier social will diminish the contributions of regular entrepreneurs—that is, people who create new companies and then grow them to scale. In the course of doing business as usual, these regular entrepreneurs create thousands of jobs, improve the quality of goods and services available to consumers, and ultimately raise standards of living. Indeed, the intertwined histories of business and health in the United States suggests that all entrepreneurship is social entrepreneurship. The pantheon of model social entrepreneurs should thus include names such as railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, meatpacking magnate Gustavus Swift, and software tycoon Bill Gates.

“THE STEW OF POVERTY

“People tend to think that advancements in health care, for example, are the achievements of either government or the social sector. More recently, they note how the work of social entrepreneurs is improving population health, particularly in developing countries.

“Yet the experience of the United States demonstrates that business entrepreneurs have done as much—if not more—for American health in the past century and a half as did medicine or public health. In the middle of the 19th century, most of the U.S. population was ridiculously poor by today’s standards. Americans not only had low incomes, but also spent the bulk of their money on life’s basics: food, clothing, and shelter. What they purchased, moreover, was of questionable quality. Because there was no refrigeration or ability to transport foods over long distances, most people subsisted on a kind of stew that, by all accounts, was simple and tasteless. A poor diet meant poor nutrition, which meant poor health.”