What Is Social Entrepreneurship?

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Social Entrepreneurship for Dummies:

Of course you’re no dummy! Still, you might be wondering what we mean when we say that we work to empower young innovators to solve some of the world’s greatest problems through social entrepreneurship. Quickly and simply, this is what we mean:

Social entrepreneurship means building ventures that create positive social change, while also being financially sustainable.

Social ventures come in all shapes and sizes, but a fundamental idea that they all share is that a business can do well (financially), while also doing good (for the world).  We don’t pretend to have all the answers about what the world needs, but we do firmly believe that entrepreneurship can be a force for good when targeted at solving social problems.

The Debate

Although we’ve done our best to simplify the concept above, a single, agreed-upon definition of social entrepreneurship remains elusive.

Social entrepreneurs identify opportunities to create financially sustainable solutions to social issues by mobilizing resources to create the social change they think is necessary for the world. In this way, social entrepreneurship is a little like art. There isn’t necessarily one agreed-upon standard for what makes good art, but the intention to create something that evokes some emotion or manifests the pursuit of human creativity enables us to call something art.

Similarly, there is no concrete definition for what is socially good. Some people might talk about empowering people, others might refer to treating others as one would want to be treated, while economists might point to graphs with indifference curves and talk about Pareto-improving transactions. Even within Compass, we debate the social contributions of different ventures, and rarely do we come to a consensus. Social entrepreneurship is a practice which looks differently to different observers. Thus, we emphasize that it is the intention to create something that solves a social problem that makes social entrepreneurship ‘social.’