All you need to know about Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Social Entrepreneurs achieve 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. A Social Entrepreneur focuses first and foremost on the social and/or ecological value creation and tries to optimize the financial value creation.

Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to move in different directions.

Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are visionaries, but also realists, and are ultimately concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.

Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss to improve systems, invent new approaches, and create solutions to change society for the better. While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur develops innovative solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale.

There are different organizational models for social enterprises some of them are non-profit organization, hybrid non-profit ventures or social business ventures. 

Startery Central and Eastern Europe, a joint initiatve of Social Impact, Ashoka and SAP, provides social start-ups with an intensive training in order to develop entrepreneurial skills so that innovative social ideas become successful businesses with high change impact on society.