Social Entrepreneurship

"Is it possible to eradicate poverty? Extend health care to every corner of the world? Ensure that every child in every country receives a good education? These visions may seem beyond reach today, but the stories in this book reveal that we can, in fact, change the world in ways that seem unbelievable. There is a hidden history unfolding today: an emerging landscape of innovators advancing solutions that have the potential to transform life around the globe."

"Indeed, social entrepreneurs are uniquely suited to make headway on problems that have resisted considerable money and intelligence. Where governments and traditional organizations look at problems from the outside, social entrepreneurs come to understand them intimately, from within. Through a persistence of looking they discover the mistaken assumptions that lead policy makers astray. Because they do not have armies or police forces behind them, they work to elicit change rather than impose it, so they build human capacity rather than encouraging dependency."

"Social Entrepreneurship is not about a few extraordinary people saving the day for everyone else. At its deepest level, it is about revealing possibilities that are currently unseen and releasing the capacity within each person to reshape a part of the world. It does not require an elite education; it requires a back-pack."

"Will social entrepreneurship take off in the decades ahead the way business took off in recent centuries? Millions of people today think about starting their own businesses—not just to make money, but to experience the excitement of seeing their ideas take shape in the world. This option now exists in the citizen sector as well. Given the right financial and social incentives, it is clear that many more people would be eager to start their own social-change vehicles, or help other to do so, inspired by visible examples all around them. In years to come, if it is properly supported, social entrepreneurship could become one of the standard career options that get discussed at the dinner table."

"Indeed, for anyone who has ever said, “This isn’t working” or “We can do better!”—for anyone who gets a kick out of challenging the status quo, shaking up the system, or practicing a little entrepreneurial “creative destruction”—these are favorable times."

"George Bernard Shaw once said, 'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.' By this definition, some of today’s leading entrepreneurs are decidedly unreasonable—and a fair few have even been dubbed crazy. Yet as John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan argue in The Power of Unreasonable People, our very future may hinge on their work."

"We face epochal challenges—from conflict, terrorism, and poverty to climate change and the threat of global pandemics. And we cannot surmount these challenges without the engagement and radical restructuring of business and markets.

Hence the upsurge in interest in the “crazy” change agents operating on the fringes of our current dysfunctional systems."

"In this book, you will discover how such pioneers are disrupting existing industries, value chains, and business designs and thereby creating fast-growing markets in every corner of the world."

"It is time to start investing in, partnering with, and learning from these world-shaping change agents. You will not only contribute to the social revolutions they’re fueling, but also position your organization to thrive in the new business landscape they are helping to define."

"Being unreasonable is not just a state of mind. It is also a process by which older, outdated forms of reasoning are jettisoned and new ones conceived and evolved. As the process unfolds, those mired in the older, obsolete paradigms can become threatened by—and aggressive toward—the innovators, particularly if those innovators move into the mainstream worlds of business, finance, and politics. But like it or not, the world is in the early stages of powerful, deep-running, and pervasive changes that, for better or worse, will transform its economies, its cultures, and people’s understanding of who they are and what they stand for."

The Four Criteria for a Hybrid Value Chain (A Social Entrepreneur Organization)

Hybrid value chains can transform industries and create whole new ones of they meet these criteria:

1. The business has the potential to be large in scale and to cross borders. The best HVCs will have enormous impact, not only on a company’s bottom line but on millions of lives.
2. For-profits and social entrepreneurs work together to create multiple kinds of value. Companies and citizen-sector organizations capitalize on their particular areas of expertise to deliver a valuable product or service that neither partner could provide on its own.
3. Consumers—broadly defined—pay for the product or service. This is not charity work or a CSR project. Sustainability and scalability rest on profitability.
4. A system-changing idea provides the basis for new competition.