Well we've got a colleague up at New York University, Paul Light,
who wrote a book looking at 27 different definitions of social entrepreneurship, so
we could poll the class and I'm sure we'd find a lot of different things.
But I'm seeing and hearing some things around business,
around sustainability, around impact.
Well I'll give you a sense of how we think about it at Case.
For us, very simply we can think of it as a process of pursuing innovative
sustainable solutions to social problems and
when I say social problems I mean environmental problems as part of that.
Problems that we have in society.
But we think of innovative and sustainable,
my colleague Greg Dees wrote the most widely cited essay on that called,
The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship and he goes into about five pages of depth.
If you blow it down that's kind of what he came out to.
Greg unfortunately, passed away about a year and a half ago.
He was really the pioneer of the field of social entrepreneurship.
First known academic to start research and
teaching about this back, originally when he was at Yale, School of Management.
And then at Harvard he taught the first known class on social entrepreneurship and
started writing when I was in the Peace Corp in the mid 90s,
I came across one of his articles in the Harvard Business Review,
Enterprising Non Profits, thinking about how non profits could use earned income
which we'll talk about in a bit and really affected my own career.
I never expected to one day be working with him here at Duke.
And he went on to the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Where he founded the Center for
Social Innovation and came to Duke in 2001 to set up Case.
So another way to think of it is recognizing resourceful pursuing
opportunities to create social value.
The idea of the over riding purposes is creating value for society,
not primarily an economic value that accrues to one person,
overall there should be a societal value.
Now, one great book to read if you're really interested in this is
David Bornstein's, How to Change the World.
It may be a little dated at this point, but still really insightful, where he
traces the paths of a number of social entrepreneurs that are a part of Ashoka,
which is the global network of leading social entrepreneurs.
And he likes to say that what business entrepreneurs are to the economy,
social entrepreneurs are to social change.
They're the driven, creative individuals who question the status quo,
exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up, and remake the world for the better.
So the idea of a change agent.
So Greg's definition really kind of really talks about this change agent idea.
That they create a mission to sustain and maximize social value.
So there's a mission driven there.
They're relentless in pursuing opportunities and
adaptive, taking opportunities to learn and refine their innovations or models.
They act boldly.
The difference between entrepreneur and the rest of us perhaps is someone who sees
an opportunity and seizes that opportunity and acts on that opportunity.
How many of you had a parent, maybe who was an entrepreneurs?
Commercial entrepreneur?
Social entrepreneur.
Anybody? A few of you.
I had a father who was an entrepreneur.
Not always so successful, but growing up I saw what it meant to take risks.
And that's something that sometimes separates entrepreneurs from
non-entrepreneurs, a willingness to take but manage risk, smart risk right?
Holding themselves accountable.
In our case, for social entrepreneurs, for
achieving an impact while using the resources wisely.
We are in a sector, the social sector, that has a lot of priority placed on
how we're using funding that's entrusted to them through donations for example.
And then one of the things that's kind of interesting for us is that this is drawing
upon some of the best thinking in the social sector, in the commercial sector.
I would also argue in the public sector as well.
And so that you see social entrepreneurship manifest itself in
non-profit forms and for profit forms, in hybrid forms, large,
small organizations, faith based organizations, grass roots organizations.
And even in corporations and so forth.
So it's a phenomenon that you can observe in a lot of different ways.
One of the great folks in our field is Sally Osberg,
who is the president of the Skoll Foundation.
Jeff Skoll was the first president of Ebay and
through his philanthropy he likes to fund and celebrate social entrepreneurs.
Maybe on NPR, you may hear their adds in the mornings sometimes and
she likes to say that the social entrepreneur is to the entrepreneur
as Ginger Rogers is to Fred Astaire.
Now for those of you who may know from maybe your parent's generation,
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire danced and sang sometimes through the old movies and
so she says that Ginger has to do everything Fred has to do, but
she has to do it backwards and in high heels, all right?
>> [LAUGH] >> So that the social entrepreneur
has certain constraints, certain limitations,
certain challenges that the commercial entrepreneur perhaps doesn't.
Sometimes when I'm with my entrepreneurship colleagues, they like to
say well, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, it's all the same thing.
And Greg and I and others would argue, well yes and no.
In fact, social entrepreneurs deal with a different set of constraints.
There are complex stakeholder environments.
There's a complex value we're trying to create.
It's not just an economic value that returns to the shareholders, but
there are stakeholder environments one has to consider.
There are different capital markets.
If you're going to start a social venture that has a nonprofit form of incorporation
for example, the way you attract capital looks different than in
a traditional commercial business.
There are all sorts of challenges around measuring impact.
Right? How do we understand and
communicate outcomes, changes in environment or
in natural settings and so forth, versus just a bottom line, a number?
We all strive for a social return on investment, but
it's a pretty subjective calculation.
So there's a lot of things that I think are unique and special about social
entrepreneurs that require or deserve special study, attention,
and education that may not be at first apparent in the entrepreneurship world.
So you see a lot of the same characteristics of entrepreneurs.
Now who knows this fellow Muhammad Yunus?
We could easily spend two hours just talking about Yunus.
Now actually, we turn to him as an example a couple times, but
really is the pioneer of the micro finance movement.
There were other folks who were innovating around these topics around the same time,
but really we look to him as the real founder of micro finance or
micro credit, as he would say, and he, of course, received a Nobel Prize in 2006.
We used to like to joke that we give out an award for leadership
in social entrepreneurship every year from Case, and we gave him our award in 2004.
So we scooped the Nobel Prize winning by about two years.
But so, and other folks want to share their thoughts on Yunus, so
you were going to add to that.
>> Well I was going to say wasn't he the one who
came up with the accountability idea.
>> Yeah. There are a lot of things.
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Absolutely,
and we'll probably come back to it in a minute, but in a few moments.
But there are some really interesting aspects of his innovation among putting
together small groups of women to be peer groups, and dropping requirements for
loan documentation, and actually having the loan officers come to the village and
not requiring a collateral.
There's a handful of things that real innovations whose modeling we can chat
about in a few moments briefly, that are replicated and
adapted in certain ways around the world.
There's some different models for micro finance.
You can see him as a classic example of social entrepreneurship.
And so, when we talk about this definition of social entrepreneurship for us,
social refers to the objectivity.
End of the day, the purpose is.
The creation of social value is not just a nice bi-product.
If you're a company and you are selling baked goods and
you're giving 1% of your profit to shelters or food kitchens,
or food pantries and so on, that's fantastic.
I wouldn't necessarily call that social entrepreneurship,
it's corporate philanthropy, it's corporate responsibility.
We tend to think of social entrepreneurship as for
the purpose of social impact and that can be a hard line to draw.
How do you judge that?
Well we tend to think of it's how people make decisions.
What's the primary interest in making decisions and
it's social impact, social value kind of the end purpose essentially.
It's different from just responsible business, it's about this impact,
it's about entrepreneurial and it can take a variety of organizational forms.
I think one of the most interesting areas today, is some of the innovations
coming around corporate form, the whole B corporation movement,
for example, looking at private companies that can have social, environmental
sorts of impact accounted for in their business model and in their operations,
and shareholders can't sue them just because they're not maximizing profit.
And so that's some innovation going on in the world that's going to fascinate us.
Other sorts of things that we're seeing especially in the non-profit side.
And experimentation with earned income and other sorts of
use of what we traditionally see is business methods, using market forces.
Using pricing, using tools of marketing,
such as social marketing to change behaviors.
Now these sorts of things are very common.
We're also seeing interesting cross sector alliances, public private partnerships
where you know an NGO may be partnering with a corporation like one of my masters.
I'm doing a masters project right now with a student whose looking at Toro and
the work they are doing with an NGO on water and how they've been working
together to develop and distribute some devices in developing world.
So this growing a lot of reasons behind that.
We can talk about that.
Intersecting cross sectoral sorts of issues.
New industries emerging and new forms of philanthropy.
Some of the folks like Jeff Skolls of the world are not kind of your Carnegies and
Forbes, they're venture philanthropists.
They're often entrepreneurs who've been successful and
want to use their philanthropy in a different way.
They want to not just give a check but they want to get involved and
help invest in capacity of organizations, help ensure innovation and
sustainability, and, of course, this whole emerging world of impact investing,
investing for financial as well as a social or environmental return.
It's just fascinating where you have a lot of research on that case right now.
So really interesting area.
I want to just take a quick moment to step back a little bit, because I think it's
helpful in understanding some of the tensions in our field.
You can get five