Entrepreneurs are individuals often described as curious, risk-taking, visionary, creative and optimistic. They take off in new directions, explore hidden resources, realise innovative ideas, and use creativity to find solutions to diverse problems.
Social entrepreneurs use innovative tools and market-driven mechanisms to solve key and urgent social problems, making a positive impact on society as a whole. Social entrepreneurship is a relatively new phenomenon and operates in areas where traditional market mechanisms and government-based support structures for allocating resources and power have failed. Social entrepreneurs usually start with limited power and resources, without key hierarchical positions, but they use their innovative thinking, enthusiasm and persuasion to reach their goals.
Image: Wyland “Hands Across the Ocean” in Washington, DC. by, woodleywonderworks' on Flickr
Social entrepreneurship is established both as a practical and academic subject primarily in the US. In Europe, this concept appeared first in the early 1990s in Italy, in close connection with the cooperative movement and the discussions around the social economy. In 2002 the UK government launched a national strategy for social entrepreneurship. Denmark also started to work on a national strategy for social innovation. The most comprehensive and widely used definition on social entrepreneurship is published by the British government in the document Social Enterprise: A Strategy for Success (2006):
“A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners".
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