Entrepreneurial? Been There, Doing That

Although the words “social entrepreneur” might seem new, the Ashoka organization adopted them to describe their mission 20 years ago. As Ashoka states, “the job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a art of society is tuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs are not content to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

“Identifying and solving large scale social problems requires a social entrepreneur because only the entrepreneur has the committed vision and inexhaustible determination to persist until they have transformed an entire system…The professional succeeds when she solves a client’s problem. The manager calls it quits when he has enabled his organization to succeed. Social entrepreneurs go beyond the immediate problem to fundamentally change communities, societies, the world…”