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Hot Topics: Social Entrepreneurship

The term social entrepreneur refers to someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Social entrepreneurs have existed throughout history, and include Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood), David Brower (Sierra Club), Mary Montessori (Montessori Schools). All culminating with the Nobel Peace prize of 2006 going to Mohammad Yunus for "economic efforts to create economic and social development from below" thru his Gameen Bank.

Articles below cover recent articles in social entrepreneurship and enterprise and people who are social entrepreneurs.

Selected articles

Due to contractual arrangements, access to some articles may be restricted to the Stanford community, and subscribers of the "Library Databases" offered through the GSB Alumni's Lifelong Learning Program. Inclusion below does not imply University endorsement of the ideas expressed.

 

Creative Capitalism Business Today, Spring 2008
On the rocky path towards financial secutiry, microfinance provides book for the world's poorest. Is it a panacea for global poverty or a temporary financial fad? View article

The Bigger, The Better Ethical Coproration, April 2008
Responsible companies can learn a lot from social entrepreneurs about selling to the poor, but first they must understand how their core business contributes to social and economic development
Big companies coming to the field of “social entrepreneurship” for the first time could be forgiven for feeling a little lost. View article

The 2008 Social Capitalist Awards Fast Company, Dec/Jan 2008
Nonprofits were born because for-profits weren't addressing some market failures--pollution, poverty, illiteracy. Profit won't cure those ills, but it's becoming a bigger part of more solutions. Below you will find the organizations that are granted the Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Award. Along with the 45 world-changing nonprofits, we also honor ten companies not only striving to make a profit, but to also make a difference. View article

Muhammad Yunus: The Unlikely Disciple Business Week,
January 31, 2008
There is no shortage of people who exemplify Peter Drucker's principles and practices—a multitude of middle managers and top executives responsible for many millions, if not billions, of dollars in economic activity. Yet the most Drucker-like of all may well be a man who launched his enterprise with a series of transactions totaling 27 bucks. View article

Doing Philanthropy the Google Way
CNetNews.com, Janurary 17, 2008
With its funding of renewable energy and early warning systems for drought and infectious diseases, Google.org is innovating and disrupting the world of corporate philanthropy just like Google did by turning online ads into big business, pushing desktop data into the Internet cloud, and jumping into the mobile and wireless spectrum industries. Veiw article

Ten Innovative Social Entrepreneurs Receive Million-Dollar Awards from the Skoll Foundation: Grants to Allow Each Organization to Expand Their Reach, Address Social Needs Around the World Skoll Foundation, March 14, 2007
The Skoll Foundation announced it is awarding $10,150,000 to 10 recipients of the 2007 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. The recipients, who will each receive three-year grants of $1,015,000, are organizations that target social issues in need of urgent attention.
View article

Mixing Mission and Business: New Aspen Institute Report Outlines Potential New Legal Forms for Social Enterprise Organizations Aspen Institute, February 26, 2007
There is now a broad range of emerging social enterprise organizations that combine philanthropy with traditional business practices to advance social purposes. While serving the functions of charitable organizations, these "hybrid" organizations still contend with tax laws and regulations that do not recognize their social contributions.
View article

These MBA Degrees Have a Green Tint
Programs emphasize a triple bottom line -- profit, people, planet San Francisco Chronicle, February 25, 2007
A nationwide trend among MBA programs to incorporate ethics, environmentalism and social values into their curricula, propelled by such factors as the late 1990s corporate scandals and growing awareness about climate change.
View article

Social Entrepreneurial Ventures: Different Values so Different Process of Creation, No? Black Enterprise, January 24, 2007
Ventures bridging profit and service goals in new and creative ways are mushrooming. Building on a review of current research, the author speculates that "bridging profit and service" should be added to the list of factors that define the entrepreneurial process.
View article

Network Philanthropy New America Foundation, January 22, 2007
EBay was still a quirky little online network, and philanthropy a strange concept for the executives who ran it. Omidyar and Skoll of Ebay offered Hero $1 million worth. But nobody had ever endowed a foundation with pre-IPO stock, and none of the other nonprofit partners they had approached wanted to experiment. Foundations did things a certain way, it seemed, and it was hard to persuade them to change.
View article

First Ashoka-Lemelson Fellowships Awarded for Innovative Social Entrepreneurship Yahoo! Finance, January 18, 2007
Seven social entrepreneurs throughout Asia are being recognized as the first recipients of the Ashoka-Lemelson Fellowship. The $4 million Fellowship program will build a critical mass of 100 inventor-entrepreneurs over the next three years.
View article

Microfinance Can Become Global Model San Jose Mercury News, December 11, 2006
Microcredit Summit Campaign, a global effort launched in 1997 to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services. Its new report compiled from 3,000 organizations states that at the end of 2005, over 113 million poor people were reached, of whom 82 million were considered ``poorest'' when they took their first loan.
View article

Vikram Akula Conferred 'Social Entrepreneur of the Year' Award for 2006. Domain-b, November 29, 2006
Akula's micro finance institution SKS Microfinance, based in Hyderabad applies global business practices to the field of micro finance. Known as the 'Starbucks of micro finance', SKS standardizes micro finance processes and uses technology to accelerate growth.
View article

First Book's Kyle Zimmer Named Social Entrepreneur of the Year in the United States by Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. PRNewswire, November 16, 2006
First Book is an international nonprofit that gives children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.
View article

Ynus, GB Win Nobel Peace Prize. Financial Times, October 14, 2006
Professor Yunus pioneered microcredit in Bangladesh in the 1970s, to provide small business loans to poor people - mostly women - without collateral.
View article

Social and Symbolic Capital and Responsible Entrepreneurship: An Empirical Investigation of SME Narratives Journal of Business Ethics, September 2006
This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 'Business Profiles', written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition.
View article [icon - Stanford Network]

Be A Global Financier...On A Shoestring. CNNMoney, January 17, 2006
The concept of letting individual, small-time, lenders pick and choose which projects to fund is new in microfinance -- the field of providing very small loans to start-up businesses, usually in the developing world. In the past the industry has been dominated by a handful of large non-profits that operate on grant money or raise cash in capital markets and then distribute as they see fit.
View article

Social Entrepreneurship Research: A Source of Explanation Prediction and Delight Journal of World Business 2006
This article puts forward the view of social entrepreneurship as a process that catalyzes social change and addresses important social needs in a way that is not dominated by direct financial benefits for the entrepreneurs.
View article [ PDF 138KB]

International Forum Social Entrepreneurship Award: Muhammad Yunus. November 17, 2005
Muhammad Yunus, microfinance pioneer and founder of the Grameen Bank discusses important issues facing the microfinance industry today as he accepts the award from the World Affairs Council. His own personal experience lending money to entrepreneurs without using collateral and developing the idea of microcredit. view video

Social Entrepreneurship - Leadership that Facilitates Societal Transformation: An Exploratory Study. Harvard Working Paper
A comparative analysis of seven cases of Social Entrepreneurship that have widely been recognized as successful. The paper suggests factors associated with successful Social Entrepreneurship that leads to significant social, political and economic improvement for disenfranchised groups.
Working paper [ PDF 205KB]

Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship. Stanford Research Paper 2005
Milton Friedman argued that the social responsibility of firms is to maximize profits. This paper examines this argument for the economic environment envisioned by Friedman in which citizens can personally give to social causes and can invest in profit-maximizing firms and firms that give a portion of their profits to social causes. Citizens obtain social satisfaction from corporate social giving, but that giving may not be a perfect substitute for personal giving.
Working paper

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Page updated by: Helen Losch