Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems - Tides Canada

Growing Opportunity1127www.grameenphone.com/index.php?id=6428www.ashoka.org29www.acumenfund.orgwww.fastcompany.com/socialwwwschwabfound.org;www.skollfoundation.orgTo our surprise, the entrepreneursinterviewed and surveyed weresignificantly more interested inresponding than we had imagined —and the thrust of our questions wasparticularly appreciated. Indeed, itsoon became clear that even the bestentrepreneurs are experiencing realgrowing pains, mainly in the field offunding — but also in a number of otherareas. For the sake of simplicity, let’sboil down the questions to three mainareas of interest:1 Who are these people, what are theytrying to do, how do they view theprospects for scaling what they do,and how optimistic/pessimistic arethey currently?2 What are the critical challenges theyface in replicating and scaling successfulsolutions to sustainability challenges?3 And how do they think of mainstreambusiness in all of this — whether as aroute to funding, a source of potentialpartnerships, or as a roadblock toprogress?We cover the first two areas in Chapter 2,the third in Chapter 3.Panel 2.1Organizational missionEach organization was asked to identifyits ‘primary area of focus.’ Social equity,selected by most respondents, includesorganizations addressing poverty,economic development, and empowermentof marginalized citizens. Notsurprisingly, a significant number ofrespondents selected ‘something else’ —an illustration of how social entrepreneurssee these challenges as interrelated andtheir solutions as out-of-the-box. Mostused the ‘something else’ response tosignal ‘several of the above.’ The resultsare shown in Figure 2.1.1 Meet the entrepreneurs2 Survey FindingsWho are these people?For non-experts who know somethingof the field, Muhammad Yunus of theGrameen Bank is probably the first personwho comes to mind. But Dr Yunus is not atypical social entrepreneur, however muchmany entrepreneurs may see him as theirmodel. Not only does he now have a NobelPrize, but he has been working in the areafor over 30 years, his institution is large,successful and globally known, and alreadypartnering with a number of majorcorporations — including Danone andTelenor. 27 By contrast, perhaps the bestway to get a sense of the more typicalhigh-performance social entrepreneuris to take a look at Ashoka’s website. 28Or, to focus on people who have gonethrough further hoops, visit the websitesof Acumen Fund, Endeavor Global, FastCompany, The Schwab Foundation, andThe Skoll Foundation. 29