[MUSIC] We're going to start off with some definitions and some Core Concepts. So, one of the Core Concepts we're going to be working on is this idea of a Social Entrepreneur and we need to ask, who are these Social Entrepreneurs? What makes them different? Where do they come from? We're also going to be working with the concept of social innovation. And the big question there is well what is social innovation? How will we know it if we see it? How is it different from other forms of public problem solving? One definition of social innovation is as follows. We contend that social innovation is the best construct for understanding and producing lasting social change. We redefine social innovation to mean, a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable or just than existing solutions and for which the value accrued goes primarily to society as a whole rather than to private individuals. This is from Jim Phills and companies article. I like this definition, and we need to focus in on a core part of it, which is social innovation comes down to something that is novel, it's a solution, it addresses a core problem or pain point. It's more effective, efficient, and sustainable than existing solutions. Social innovation at its core has to create value, and we'll come back to this idea of value creation. But the core part of it is that value has to accrue to everyone, to the broader society, not just to one individual. So if that's what a social innovation might entail, something new, something creative, something efficient and effective. Let's ask a question of well what is a social entrepreneur and what is this field of social entrepreneurship that's chasing after the idea of social innovation. Social entrepreneurs are a very distinct group of people. They're people who adopt a mission, a goal to create value. They wake up in the morning saying, how can I create value, how can I make social impact? They have a relentless character to them, social entrepreneurs are constantly looking for new opportunities to meet their mission, to advance their cost. They are constantly also looking for a chance to innovate, to adapt and to learn. They don't take one idea and stick with it for a long period of time, they will evolve, they'll move. They'll adjust their ideas, they'll recalibrate, they'll refire. Social entrepreneurs also are very bold. Social entrepreneurs act without worrying about resources, they bootstrap. They do whatever it takes to get an idea off the ground. They take any resources that are available, they deploy them for the social purpose. A final characteristic of a social entrepreneur is someone who is very accountable. Someone who realizes that they're working on a problem that affects lots of people, and that these constituencies have to be addressed and served carefully. So if you put that together, those are elements from Greg Dees' definition of social entrepreneurs and what they look like. If you put that together with the idea of social entrepreneurs pursuing social innovation, we start to get the idea that this course is going to be about people who are taking big risks operating with very little resources sometimes, taking advantage of opportunities that arise and they're trying to come up with solutions to problems that will meet public problems, pressing problems. They're going to try to come up with innovative, new solutions. So that gives us a little starting point of what social innovation might look like and what a social entrepreneur might be like. But let's make this more concrete. Let's just take one example out of the millions of possible ideas. Think about the problem. It's a huge problem, of infants dying around the world, due to exposure. Prematurely born children don't have incubators in a lot of countries around the world. They're way too expensive. Incubators can cost thousands and thousands of dollars. And as a result, children die of exposure every day. They can't get the care they need. They can't get the warmth that they require to survive. A group of students in Stanford in a class on engineering for extreme affordability looked at this problem of premature death of babies, and said why can't we design an innovative new incubator? And their idea was what if the incubator were to cost $25, not $2500. They devised a little tiny sleeping bag. The sleeping bag keeps the baby at exactly the right temperature because inside the sleeping bag is a space-aged wax technology that's inserted into the back pouch of the sleeping bag. This wax, once it's heated, you heat it over boiling water, you slide it into the back of the sleeping bag, it keeps the baby at proper temperature for four hours. Then the wax is removed, re-heated and re-inserted. For a very low cost, a huge global problem is being addressed. This product, called the Embrace Incubator has all the aspects of social innovation. It represents a new lower cost solution. It represents a solution that's financially sustainable that can run out of zone. They sell this incubators and they're able to sustain the organization without large and charitable inputs. It has incredible capacity for scale, it can grow and it has grown in countries all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of these units have been sold. Social entrepreneurs are doing things like this little baby's incubator. It is a new way of thinking about a problem. It takes away all the assumptions we have about what an incubator might look like. It says, what if we reinvent the whole thing at a radically different cost structure and a totally different technology? And in this way, the innovation I think is a breakthrough. And the people behind it, who are driving this product into countries all around the world where it's desperately needed, they are fundamentally pure social entrepreneurs. So there are many different ways in which social entrepreneurs pursue their goals. This is just one example and during the course of this term, we will look at a lot of different examples of social entrepreneurs doing and all types different things in all parts of the world. [MUSIC]
