Understanding What Social Entrepreneurship Is essential. It refers to the practice of using innovation, resourcefulness as well as opportunity to address various critical social-environmental challenges. A social entrepreneur focuses on transforming practices systems that are the primary causes of things such as environmental deterioration, marginalization, poverty, marginalization, or even any resultant loss of human dignity.
In doing this, they might set up either non-profit or for-profit organizations; however, their main objective is to create a very sustainable systems change. And so, the key concepts that define social entrepreneurship are market orientation innovation and systems change.
Let’s take a closer look at exactly what a social entrepreneur does:
Who is a social entrepreneur?
Social entrepreneur are typically drivers of change. They work in tandem with various networks, institutions and communities and create different solutions that are sustainable, and efficient, ones that actually have a measurable impact. These individuals also have very high levels of integrity and maintain transparency in the things they do. Social entrepreneurs are all united by their abilities to:
- Adopt a certain mission to create as well as sustain social value (and not only commercial value)
- Recognize and then relentlessly pursue various new opportunities to serve a specific mission
- Engage processes of continuous learning, innovation and adaptation
- Act very boldly without actually being limited by the resources that are currently in hand
- They also exhibit very high levels of accountability to constituencies that are served, and the outcomes that are created.
A unique approach
A social entrepreneur is an individual that recognizes a social problem and then uses various entrepreneurial principles to create, organize & manage a venture to turn it into one of social change. This is very different from what a business entrepreneur does as they will measure their performance in terms of return and profit. Contrastingly, an entrepreneur is always focused on creating social capital. Therefore the primary goal of social entrepreneurship is to propagate social and environmental goals.
The other attributes of social entrepreneurs are that they are extremely ambitious and persistent, and they tackle major social issues very effectively, creatively and innovatively. They also offer new ideas that have the potential to bring about wide-scale change. They don’t really leave societal needs to the business sectors or the government. Instead, they find what isn’t working & then solve the problem by actually spreading the solution, changing the system and effectively persuading entire societies to follow new paths.