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Social Entrepreneurship Revisited |
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Stanford Social Innovation Review - Paul C. Light: Social entrepreneurship is one of the most alluring terms on the problem-solving landscape today, and is in use even in the new Obama administration. The President is quite familiar with the term and has embraced a first-of-its-kind investment fund for social entrepreneurship. The question is not whether social entrepreneurship is a term in good currency, but what it actually means. This question motivated my three-year search for social entrepreneurship, which was funded by the Skoll and Ewing Marion Kauff man foundations. Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton first used the term “social entrepreneurship” in the early 1980s, and it continues to inspire images of audacious social change—the kind that sweeps away the old approaches to solving intractable social problems such as disease, hunger, and poverty. Like business entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship involves a wave of creative destruction that remakes society. Although we will always need traditional social services— even more during times of great economic turmoil—social entrepreneurship focuses on changing the underlying dynamics that create the demand for services in the first place. Instead of treating society’s distress, social entrepreneurship holds hope for eliminating the distress altogether. Paul C. Light is a professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and the author of The Search for Social Entrepreneurship (Brookings Institution Press, 2008).
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