Working to Support Entrepreneurship

This is someone who identifies a specific social or community-based need, identifies a solution to this social problem, brings other people and resources together to address the solution, sets up an organisation of some type to implement the solution and then manages this organisation to implement the solution and address the social issue.  It is the identify, assess and implement process, thus entrepreneurship, but done to address a social need rather than a commercial or profit-driven need. 

A social enterprise is an organisation set up and run to address a specific social need.  They operate along normal business lines and deliver services to clients.  They tend to be ‘nonprofit’ in nature, in that, any profits made get re-invested into the business rather than be taken out by shareholders.  They tend to have nonprofit or charity status in most countries and are driven by a desire to solve the social need for which they were established.

Social entrepreneurship is the process of identifying social needs, assessing their viability, bringing together the right people and resources and creating solutions for the social need and delivering necessary social goods and services to the people who need them.  It is the application of the process of entrepreneurship to addressing social needs.  If the clients cannot pay for the services directly, social enterprises will undertake other commercial activities to raise revenue to meet the financial shortfall or get a third party to pay for the services (the State in many countries).

Social innovation is the process of developing new and innovative solutions to social needs and challenges.  Social innovation addresses the early-stages of the process: ideation, engagement, trial and error, testing and evaluation.  Once a solution has been proven to work it tends to be mainstreamed and becomes a mature solution which can be a social enterprise, community-development organisation, an advocacy group or labour-market programme etc.  Thus, the messy, chaotic period at the beginning of social organisations and addressing social needs and challenges is called social innovation.

A charity is an organisation that operates to address a social problem and have forgiveness from many forms of taxation to allow them raise the money necessary to meet their service needs.  Unlike social enterprises that use at their core a trading model, traditional charities raise money through fundraising, philanthropy and government grants to raise the money they need.