Building the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship

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Building the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship

One of my favourite Ted Talks of all time was delivered by Simon Sinek over 10 years ago, and is titled How Great Leaders Inspire Action. In the Ted Talk, he relates the success of great businesses to the decisions of their leaders to begin with a purpose and then build a business to achieve that purpose. On the flip side, businesses that fail are built with the purpose as an after thought, and as a result are unable to follow through with their goals.

With that being said, we’re starting to see of individuals to be attracted to businesses that have a purpose that aligns with their worldview. In that regard, the concept of social entrepreneurship is beginning to gain traction in the media, from politicians, to celebrities and undoubtedly, entrepreneurs.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

As a whole, entrepreneurship refers to the ability to act on opportunities with the end goal of bringing something new to the world. By extension, social entrepreneurship emphasizes the need to drive social change with the goal of providing transformational benefit to society.

Social entrepreneurship is attractive because it allows an individual to create ventures that provide the twin benefit of maximizing profit, while simultaneously maximizing social benefit.

From my research, social entrepreneurship can be carried out in three different ways. The first of these is to build a business and employ individuals who would, otherwise, have not been able to be employed due to unavoidable circumstances. The second method is to build a business that contributes a portion of it’s earnings towards social causes. The third and final method of social entrepreneurship, at the highest level, is to build a business or a product that is, in itself, aimed at providing social benefit.

Reminiscing the Future

When it comes to looking at the future, we can’t really see it because it hasn’t happened yet. But what we can do, is to anticipate it, and by anticipating the problems of the future, we can develop solutions that can shape it to be aligned with the future that we envision it to be.

The purpose for creating this project is to create a community around building a better future through social entrepreneurship. It aims to drive conversations around innovative technologies that have been used in the past and how they can be used to develop future trends. In this way, we can build a future that we want, and make a positive change in the world we live in