Posts Tagged ‘social business’

What makes an entrepreneur social?

Social entrepreneur” is a term with many definitions and one that keeps changing. But, in my own words, a social entrepreneur is a leader and someone who innovates to meet a need and solve human and environmental problems.

The Huffington Post has joined the Schwab Foundation to dedicate an entire page to social entrepreneurs. You can check it out, and follow it on Twitter, here:

HuffPost Social Entrepreneurship

One evolving change in the perception of social entrepreneurship has to do with profit. With the advent of social business and social venture capital, a venture can be for profit or nonprofit but in either case there needs to be a social return on investment.

Some continue to feel that social ventures have been traditionally nonprofit and should stay that way. They feel uncomfortable with “making money off of the poor”.

What do you think? Should an entrepreneur with a social venture make money?

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Catch the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship TODAY

Sadly, the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, March 28-30, 2012 at the University of Oxford, England,  is by invitation only. Sadly, I won’t be there. But I can live vicariously through the Internet!

Why have a world forum on social entrepreneurship? Because it matters! A lot.  By the way, this link is to Skoll Foundation CEO Sally Osberg’s post on the Huffington Post.  And Ariana Huffington is a featured speaker at the forum this year.

 

 

For those of us who can’t be in Oxford, video recordings of select presentations are available online and also in live stream. Here’s the schedule:

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Scratch-offs + cell phones = energy.

Read how this social entrepreneur is bringing a pay-as-you go system to provide the world’s poorest people access to solar energy:

  1. Get a unique code from a scratch-off card.
  2. Send a text with the code to a local service.
  3. The service that will then credit the specified personal solar cell.

From the Sun (Bypassing the Grid) to the BoP Consumer.

Social businesses are reaching and improving the lives of the world’s poorest Continue reading