What is Social Entrepreneurship?

In 2016, leaders from diverse sectors such as politics (Mr. Obama, Then-president of U.S.A.), business (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google), and NGO/NPOs gathered at Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) at Stanford University. They discussed how to create and innovate ways to tackle global social problems through entrepreneurship.

Leveraging entrepreneurship to solve social problems is not a new idea indeed. After graduating from Harvard and Yale Law School, Bill Drayton worked at McKinsey Consulting, and then served at Mr. Carter’s Administration, where he coined the idea of CER (Certified Emission Reduction) system. With experience and expertise in business, law, and public administration, he founded an NGO, Ashoka, in 1980. He believed that people with great ideas and entrepreneurial mindset can find good solutions to social problems. If the mechanisms of such solutions can be copied and pasted to address similar problems in other fields or other regions, then we might make meaningful social changes he believed. He called such people social entrepreneurs.

According to Bill Drayton, social entrepreneurs would not be satisfied by giving fish to poor people, or teaching them how to fish. Rather, based on creativity, empathy, and partnership, social entrepreneurs would strive to innovate the fish industry as a whole. Since then, Ashoka has identified over 3,700 social entrepreneurs across nations, calling them Ashoka Fellows. Among them, three received Nobel Prize. Have you heard about any social entrepreneur? Let’s take a look at some interesting and inspiring examples of social entrepreneurs in the next step.