Social Entrepreneurs: The Next Big Thing?

Around this time last year, John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan released an interesting book on how social entrepreneurs deal with and solve some of the world's most pressing economic, social, and environmental problems almost simultaneously and (this is the neat thing) while doing so creating new markets across the globe.

Pamela Hartigan is the head of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Her co-author, John Elkington, is the founder of a consulting firm SustainAbility and a progressive thinker whose work I have read since many years ago as an MBA student. His most famous one is perhaps Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Why does the term 'social entrepreneurs' become one of today's buzzwords?
a. Because the challenges we face today as human beings are getting extremely complex
b. Governments are too slow to respond to these challenges; the bureaucrats are once again clueless
c. Businesses are finding themselves in a dire need to revitalize themselves in the declining global market

The combination of the three facts above set the stage of social entrepreneurs; those who know how to do well by doing good. They are both socially responsible and commercially adept at spotting profitable opportunities in unlikely places. They are able to solve large scale issues in developing countries with very limited resources, very creative solutions, and very tangible, lasting benefits for the wider society.

The title of the book, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, was inspired by a quote by George Bernard Shaw: “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.”

The book outlines cases of how these social entrepreneurs capitalize on the dire situations confronting the poorest consumers at the "bottom of the pyramid". Following the footsteps of the grandad of social entrepreneurs and the nobel prize winner Mr Mohammed Yunus, they turned the poorest clients into profitable customers.

Several cases in point cited in the book. ParqueSoft is an innovative technology incubator that reaches out to young people from poor areas of Columbia to develop software teams for companies in optics, artificial intelligence, “edutainment,” bioinformatics, and nanotechnology. At the same time that the incubator supports research and development and teaches business concepts. Another social experiment cited in the book is a for-profit organization called Sekem which developed new farming methods in Egypt to support six new businesses in the area of food production. It also improves the value chain and builds transparency and fairness that did not exist before; hence enhancing the overall welfare of the farmers.