SOCIAL ENTREPENEURSHIP
WHAT IS SOCIAL ENTREPENEURSHIP?
The concept is defined differently by different people and organizations. SBIG defines social entrepreneurship as an emerging business paradigm that bridges the non profit and for profit business models with principles that historically have defined what entrepreneurs do.
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FEATURE
Social Entrepreneur Flies Below the Radar in Texas
Texas isn’t noted around the country as a place where social entrepreneurship is catching on. In fact few people in Dallas seem to have ever heard of the concept of doing well while doing good at the same time. Dallas is a hard-core corporate business town where financial profit from a diverse economic mix of transportation, energy, telecommunications, information technology, banking and finance and multimedia development drive the 4th largest metropolitan area in the United States. With large influxes of immigration from Mexico and serious needs in the economic underclass, Dallas needs social entrepreneurs desperately. They may not be organized and vocal on the national scene yet, but the city does have people working with the business model.
The first thing a customer notices when walking inside the Chest of Treasures is an honest to goodness life-sized pirate chest overflowing with trinkets and treasures of all kinds. The sign on the chest scrawled in ancient looking script reads;
Welcome to the Chest of Treasures; where the guests of the chest, are the treasures of the chest....read more»
Putting Business Back Into Social Entrepeneurship. Part Two: Mission vs. Budget Driven Enterprise Decisions
In part one of this series, we discussed the question of whether social change
is best served in the current landscape through philanthropy or social entrepreneurship.
We also defined the nature of entrepreneurship, discussed SBIG’s philosophical
position that social entrepreneurs should be fundamentally tied to the idea
that internally generated revenue rather than dependent financial relationships
is the preferred strategy in the light of new economy realities.
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Finding Hidden Social Entrepreneurs
“What’s a social entrepreneur?” asked the distinguished looking man in the grey pinstripe suit as he glanced at my stick-on name tag identifying my profession.
Sizing him up for a surveying moment, I extracted from my list what I felt was the appropriate definition for him…”It’s somebody pursuing a new form of business that merges socially engaged vision and the desire to benefit society with the ability to produce a marketable product or service that sustains the social benefit with it’s own internally generated financial support”, I replied, hoping to see a flicker of interest on his face. “It’s the merger of advanced business management skills with the vision for community good that non profits bring to the table.”
“Oh MBA’s wouldn’t be interested in that”, he said. They want to make money.”
This conversation took place at Dallas’ prestigious Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business at a gathering of SMU professors, MBA students, alumni and invited hotshots from the local business community called the Tate Distinguished Lecture Series. I’d gone there one night after wrangling an invitation from the president of a campus business club, to hear a Wall Street tycoon lecture on how to make $4 million a year in hedge funds. The speaker, a department head with a PhD in economics, looked at me with an amused look that told me everything I needed to know about what he thought of the idea. I resisted the urge to ask why Harvard Business School was interested and he wasn’t.
Such is the level of understanding concerning social entrepreneurship in Dallas, one of the most dynamic business communities in the nation, yet a virtual lunar landscape when it comes to engaged leadership in social entrepreneurship. The lack of any installed knowledge base in the field here has left me desirous of finding social entrepreneurs in Dallas who don’t know they are social entrepreneurs.
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