Manitou Messenger

Issue date: 9/26/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Ben Hovland Visiting professor Greg Dees adresses students interested in solving social problems with business ventures. Dees credits social innovation and social enterprise as the two main components of social entrepreneurship.

Visiting scholar Greg Dees addressed students and faculty at a lecture entitled "Social entrepreneurship: An emerging field in higher education" on Sept. 19. Dees is a professor in the practice of social entrepreneurship and nonprofit management and a founding faculty director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

"It all began in the 1980s," Dees said, when two types of thinking emerged that approached social problems in new ways. The first type was social enterprise and the second was social innovation.

Social enterprise involves nonprofit organizations that are concerned about inadequate funding for social problems.

To solve the underfunding problem, the administrators of these organizations used the social problem of unemployment as a business opportunity.

These social entrepreneurs would start a bakery, for example, and use the homeless or unemployed as workers. In this way, the employees would benefit from having a stable job, and the bakery would bring in a profit that would allow the administrators to continue their service; it was a self-sustaining profit.

Social innovation, the second type of new thinking that developed in the 1980s, involved finding new and creative ways to solve social problems, especially those found in developing countries.

Mohammed Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in social innovation, where he used his knowledge of microcredit to provide impoverished Indian entrepreneurs with loans that would normally be considered too small for a traditional bank to award.

Eventually these two ways of thinking converged and became social entrepreneurship. This type of business uses entrepreneurial principles to create new business ventures to facilitate social change.

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