Social Entrepreneurship in Today's world

Some have created for profit organizations. A recent example is Vikram Akula founder CEO of SKS Microfinance, the McKinsey alumnus who started a microlending venture in villages of Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Though this venture is for profit, it has initiated a sharp social change amongst poor women from villages.

There are continuing arguments over precisely who counts as a social entrepreneur. Some have advocated restricting the term to founders of organizations that primarily rely on earned income – meaning income earned directly from paying consumers. Others have extended this to include contracted work for public authorities, while others still include grants and donations. This argument is unlikely to be resolved soon. Peter Drucker, for example, once wrote that there was nothing as entrepreneurial as creating a new university: yet in most developed countries the majority of university funding comes from the state.

Today, nonprofits and non-governmental organizations, foundations, governments and individuals promote, fund, and advise social entrepreneurs around the planet. A growing number of colleges and universities are establishing programs focused on educating and training social entrepreneurs.

Organizations such as Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, the Skoll Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, the Canadian Social Entrepreneurship Foundation, New Profit Inc. and Echoing Green among others, focus on highlighting these hidden change-makers who are scattered across the globe. Ashoka's Changemakers "open sourcing social solutions" initiative Changemakers uses an online platform for what it calls collaborative competitions to build communities of practice around pressing issues. The North American organizations tend to have a strongly individualistic stance focused on a handful of exceptional leaders, while others in Asia and Europe emphasize more how social entrepreneurs work within teams, networks and movements for change.

Current Practice in Social Entrepreneurship

One well known contemporary social entrepreneur is Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The work of Yunus and Grameen echoes a theme among modern day social entrepreneurs that emphasizes the enormous synergies and benefits when business principles are unified with social ventures.

In some countries - including Bangladesh and to a lesser extent the USA - social entrepreneurs have filled the spaces left by a relatively small state. In other countries - particularly in Europe and South America - they have tended to work more closely with public organizations at both the national and local level. Agency management software helps business to work at differnt level.

The George Foundation's Women's Empowerment program empowers women by providing education, cooperative farming, vocational training, savings plan, and business development. In 2006 the cooperative farming program, Baldev Farms, was the second largest banana grower in South India with 250 acres under cultivation. Profits from the farm are used for improving the economic status of the workers and for running the other charitable activities of the foundation.

ref: wikipedia, Insurance Software, NGO

History for Social Entrepreneurship

We are talking Social Entrepreneurship here. Business working with agency management system and useing crm software are more helpful to run and achieve shocial movement targets.

History
The terms social entrepreneur and social entrepreneurship were first used in the literature on social change in the 1960s and 1970s. It came into widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s, promoted by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Bill Drayton the founder of Ashoka, and others such as Charles Leadbeater .

From the 1950s to the 1990s Michael Young was a leading promoter of social enterprise and in the 1980s was described by Professor Daniel Bell at Harvard as 'the world's most successful entrepreneur of social enterprises' because of his role in creating over 60 new organizations worldwide, including a series of Schools for Social Entrepreneurs in the UK.

Although the terms are relatively new, social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship can be found throughout history. A list of a few historically noteworthy people whose work exemplifies classic "social entrepreneurship" might include Florence Nightingale, founder of the first nursing school and developer of modern nursing practices, Robert Owen founder of the cooperative movement and Vinoba Bhave (founder of India's Land Gift Movement).

During the 19th and 20th centuries some of the most successful social entrepreneurs successfully straddled the civic, governmental and business worlds - promoting ideas that were taken up by mainstream public services in welfare, schools and healthcare.

ref: agency management system, wikipedia, Enterprise Software

Social Entrepreneurship---Meaning

Any definition of social entrepreneurship should reflect the need for a substitute for the market discipline that works for business entrepreneurs who use agency management system. We cannot assume that market discipline will automatically weed out social ventures that are not effectively and efficiently utilizing resources. The following definition combines an emphasis on discipline and accountability with the notions of value creation taken from Say, innovation and change agents from Schumpeter, pursuit of opportunity from Drucker, and resourcefulness from Stevenson. In brief, this definition can be stated as follows:
Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector, by:

1. Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value),
2. Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,
3. Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,
4. Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
5. Exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.

This is clearly an —idealized definition. Social sector leaders will exemplify these characteristics in different ways and to different degrees. The closer a person gets to satisfying all these conditions, the more that person fits the model of a social entrepreneur. Those who are more innovative in their work and who create more significant social improvements will naturally be seen as more entrepreneurial. Those who are truly Schumpeterian will reform or revolutionize their industries. Each element in this brief definition deserves some further elaboration. Let‘s consider each one in turn.

Change agents in the social sector:
Social entrepreneurs are reformers and revolutionaries, as described by Schumpeter, but with a social mission. They make fundamental changes in the way things are done in the social sector. Their visions are bold. They attack the underlying causes of problems, rather than simply treating symptoms. They often reduce needs rather than just meeting them. They seek to create systemic changes and sustainable improvements. Though they may act locally, their actions have the potential to stimulate global improvements in their chosen arenas, whether that is education, health care, economic development, the environment, the arts, or any other social field.

Ref: The above note is something i read from J. Gregory Dees artical on Meaning of social entrepreneurship, agency management software

Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.

Whereas business entrepreneurs typically measure performance in profit and return, social entrepreneurs assess their success in terms of the impact they have on society.

While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors. Most of the social enterpreneurs are using agency management software for business.

Reference:
1) Agency Management System (AMS)

2) http://en.wikipedia.org