There is still a lot of excitement and buzz in the air from last week’s highly successfulCanadian Conference on Social Enterprise in Vancouver. Vancouver’s weekly business magazine Business in Vancouver just published a 4 page colour insert on the conference and the BC Social Enterprise Fund, summarizing some of the great work happening right here in BC moving this global trend forward.
Social Enterprise isn’t only making news in BC. Last week at the World Economic Forumin Davos, Switzerland, entrepreneurs working for social and environmental change were a bit of a cause celebre (other hot topics included Climate Change and Web 2.0 , two familiar ones around here). Check out New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s article on social entrepreneurs at the NYT website (subscription required unfortunately,email me if you want me to send you a copy). Here is my favourite quote:
The World Economic Forum here in Davos is the kind of place where if you let yourself get distracted while walking by a European prime minister on your left, you could end up tripping over a famous gazillionaire — and then spilling your coffee onto the king on your right. But perhaps the most remarkable people to attend aren’t the world leaders or other bigwigs.
Rather, they are the social entrepreneurs. Davos, which has always been uncanny in peeking just ahead of the curve to reflect the zeitgeist of the moment, swarmed with them…
It’s one of the most hopeful and helpful trends around. These folks aren’t famous, and they didn’t fly to Davos in first-class cabins or private jets, but they are showing that what it really takes to change the world isn’t so much wealth or power as creativity, determination and passion.
Nice. Here is another article from last week’s Times of India about Davos attendee Bill Drayton, the former McKinsey consultant who founded Ashoka , the global hub of top social entrepreneurs. Bill coined the term ‘social entrepreneur’ to "describe individuals who have the energy, determination and innovation of entrepreneurs, but focus on changing the way society works rather than setting up businesses." Here’s what he has to say about straight up businesses and their role in this growing global movement:
Business strategists who haven’t woken up to the emergence of a world in which everyone is a changemaker could be in for a big surprise, just like western companies were caught off-guard by the rise of Japan. Collaborating with the citizen sector and using its strengths to create hybrid value chains could be a huge source of competitive advantage. Besides, corporates could increasingly look at the citizen sector as a source of recruitment of proven innovators. At a structural level, businesses are increasingly going to have to remake themselves to become organisations of changemakers, because that will be the success factor. Look at companies like Google, which want every single employee to be creative. Companies which embrace this paradigm first, will be the ones that benefit."
I love this stuff! The trend towards business and the social sector blending has been happening for a number of years now and it’s great to see global leaders and the media taking notice. I think the more people hear about these new models and the measurable results they produce the more support this sector as a whole and individual social entrepreneurs within it will receive from society. As anyone who has started a business will tell you, it’s a heck of a lot of work and you need all kinds of support – financial, educational, emotional, technical – from all kinds of people to make it viable.
I imagine a world not too far in the future where more of these new enterprises scale up to become the leading institutions in the future, providing meaningful work for talented people and hope that some of our gnarliest challenges can be solved, bringing us closer to global harmony. It’s coming.
