Social Entrepreneurs are powerful change agents

In a blog on using marketing tools and techniques to change individuals’ behavior, I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the good work and the support of Ashoka and their network of fellows, volunteers, and experts worldwide.

Ashoka is a global organization that is dedicated to recognizing and supporting social entrepreneurs in order to develop meaningful social change. Their belief is that it is possible to develop a social marketplace for ideas where everyone can be a changemaker.

I recently was invited to an event where Ashoka Canada inducted eleven new fellows, each of whom are leading measurable projects of transformational change in social policy and social service delivery in Canada. Although they are certainly not the only Canadians who are making significant contributions, it is delightful to see them recognized and supported by Ashoka Canada.

A social entrepreneur can be defined in many different ways. Ashoka explains their use of the term as follows:

There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.

Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, 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. 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.

The discipline of social marketing is a swiss army knife for social entrepreneurs.

It is a box of tools to assist the social entrepreneur as they implement their ideas on a wide scale. Social marketing can help transform one person’s ideas into group action.

What differentiates a social entrepreneur from any executive director of a charity, or leader of a church congregation, or member of a service club, or even a political activist? The difference lies in the application of entrepreneurial spirit: the desire to find new scalable mechanisms to tackle endemic, significant, social problems. Many social entrepreneurs establish charities as a vehicle to house their action. Others perhaps work through social networks, social affiliations, family foundations or even in a private or non-profit business setting.

Social entrepreneurs are not limited to one sector. Nor is the term a simple reinvention of the celebration of voluntary activity or civil society organization. Nevertheless, the term social entrepreneur is a way to identify the global leaders who are championing transformational changes to perspectives, policy and citizen engagement in order to improve society.

In the words of David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World, social entrepreneurs are “positive disrupters.” They are in business to improve the social fabric, even if that means challenging the social mores. One might say that they don’t have a profit motive to drive their efforts, but they have an ethical imperative that governs their entrepreneurship.