Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems - Tides Canada

Growing Opportunity5One thing that is likelyto bewilder mainstreambusiness brains enteringthe world of social enterpriseis the near-fetishfor discussing definitions.Huge effort has beeninvested — and continuesto be invested — in definingsocial and environmentalentrepreneurship and inidentifying and classifyingthe relevant entrepreneurs10www.sustainability.com/downloads_public/skoll_reports/business_primer.pdf1 IntroductionHow do you grow economic, social,educational, and political opportunityto the degree required to ensure thatthe 21st century is significantly lessturbulent and violent than the 20th?Part of the answer will be to invest inentrepreneurial solutions to the world’spressing problems, and to build thesystem conditions in which solutionsare encouraged to replicate and scale.In this sense, the social and environmentalentrepreneurs discussed inGrowing Opportunity are models of howto push towards a more sustainablefuture.But that’s not always how they are seen. 10Business people encountering the world ofsocial entrepreneurship for the first timeoften emerge confused, at least to beginwith. The sort of questions they raiseinclude: Why all the excitement? How arethese people different from NGOs? Isn’tentrepreneurship what business alreadydoes? How can you expect the world’spoorest to represent any sort of market?And how can ventures operating at thisrelatively small scale ever hope to changethe world, as they proclaim their ambitionto be. All great questions, but before westart looking for answers, it is worthremembering the critics at the time couldeasily have expressed — indeed often did —the same skepticism about the likes ofPasteur, the Wright Brothers or, in morerecent times, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,who not only founded Apple but alsocatalyzed the early growth of the personalcomputer industry.No doubt a great deal of debate went intowhat a germ was, into what sort of futureaircraft might have or whether PCs wouldever challenge the computing power ofIBM’s ‘Big Iron.’ One thing that is likelyto bewilder mainstream business brainsentering the world of social enterprise isthe near-fetish for discussing definitions.Huge effort has been invested — andcontinues to be invested — in definingsocial and environmental entrepreneurshipand in identifying and classifying therelevant entrepreneurs. Important work,no question, but you tend to know thesepeople when you meet them. The aircrackles with energy. They aim to turnapparently insoluble crises into tomorrow’spolitical, social, and market opportunities.Some definitions can be found on page 7,but as Jed Emerson — one of the field’smost influential thought-leaders — warnedus, an over-emphasis on definitions can bedistracting. ‘We risk wasting the comingyears in endless discussions of how manyangels dance on the head of a pin,’ heargued, ‘as opposed to what wonderfulgarments we might collectively stitchtogether.’The key point is that a range of social,environmental, and governance challengesincreasingly demand something morethan corporate citizenship responses.They require innovative, entrepreneurial,and — often — disruptive strategies whichincumbent companies are often ill-preparedto develop or deliver.This isn’t an either social entrepreneurshipor big business agenda, but will involveboth together. Looking at the worlds ofour three sponsoring organizations, theevidence is clear. A company like the USchemical giant DuPont, with its longstanding‘sustainable growth’ strategy,has the capacity to bring new solutions toscale. To take just two of DuPont’s 2015goals: it aims to grow annual revenues fromproducts that create energy efficiency orcut greenhouse gas emissions by $2 billion,and to nearly double revenues from nondepletableresources to at least $8 billion.The involvement of German financialservices group, Allianz, underscores thegrowing role of the financial sector insupporting entrepreneurial solutions to thebroad spectrum of sustainability challenges.And Jeff Skoll’s background as a co-founderof eBay spotlights the emergence of verydifferent thinking on how business modelscan be designed to replicate and scale —even, if the X Prize Foundation has its way(page 29), in such demanding areas aspoverty alleviation.