Brainforum

How to define Social Entrepreneurship?

The recent article in Beyond Profit magazine caught my attention towards the incessant doubt that I had at the back of my head – “Who exactly is a Social Entrepreneur?”, “What is the thin line of difference between a social entrepreneur and a just another businessman?”.

Probably I have matured a lot since I asked these questions to myself for the first time, as I was able to make a deeper understanding of the questions and my derivations to answer those questions. As a student of engineering background, I am more inclined towards deriving a generalized answer rather than discussing several contingent situations.

Lets just divide the whole business sector in four segments:

• Profits
• Innovation (disruptive innovation) – may or may not be technological
• Poverty alleviation
• Sustainability

The list is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive so that we are not missing any single element of the business domain.

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Solve the problems of the villages to help the cities

I remember reading a comprehension passage during my school years titled “A billion strong or weak” which in a Rashomon-esque manner illustrated how we can look at India either as a billion mouths to feed or as 2 billion powerful hands that can be put to work.

Idealistic in many ways, it emphasized on a very important part which I only realized after coming to college.

The economy has to ensure that there’s inclusive growth. This isn’t a rant against capitalism, neither is it a cry for pity. Over the last 2 years I have immersed myself to learn more about the developmental sector and the problems that face our nation. A talk with an eminent social entrepreneur (and one of the first Oxfam GB trustees from a developing nation) made me realize that most models of capitalism don’t benefit the poor because of the way they are structured. The poor end up having no savings because they are caught in a vicious cycle of loans and debt out of which there is no escape. This isn’t to say that capitalism in itself is wrong, in fact I believe that market based approaches to alleviating poverty are in fact very essential for progress. But the form of capitalism that I subscribe to should be inclusive in nature.

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