Social Entrepreneurs – Characteristics and Objectives
While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale. Social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss and improving systems, inventing new approaches, and creating solutions to change society for the better.
Social Entrepreneurship
The essence of entrepreneurship is the burning desire to create an organization that focuses in helping humanity by solving societal problems, providing needs, and in the process, the entrepreneur can make money. Social entrepreneurship is about applying practical, innovative and sustainable approaches to benefit society in general, with an emphasis on those who are marginalized and poor.
Characteristics of Social Entrepreneurs
1.Social entrepreneurs don’t do well in bureaucracies. They cannot sit back and wait for change to happen – they are the drivers of change.
2.A social entrepreneur is a pragmatic visionary who achieves large scale, systemic and sustainable social change through a new invention, a different approach, a more rigorous application of known technologies or strategies, or a combination of these.
3.A social entrepreneur has a practical but innovative stance to a social problem, often using market principles and forces, coupled with dogged determination, that allows them to break away from constraints imposed by ideology or field of discipline, and pushes them to take risks that others wouldn’t dare.
4.Social entrepreneurs are innovative, resourceful, and results oriented. They draw upon the best thinking in both the business and nonprofit worlds to develop strategies that maximize their social impact. These entrepreneurial leaders operate in all kinds of organizations: large and small; new and old; religious and secular; nonprofit, for-profit, and hybrid.
