Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector: Philanthropic Travel

A major challenge facing business leaders is how to enhance the effectiveness of their social responsibility initiatives while substantially improving overall organizational performance. Despite the best of intentions and trillions of dollars worth of assets, nonprofits have been unable to solve many of society's worst ills. A new casebook by 4 Harvard Business School professors argues that the social sector should take an entrepreneurial approach.

The social sector is big business. In the United States alone some 1.5 million nonprofits and other social ventures have combined revenues of $700 billion and control assets valued at $2 trillion -a seemingly substantial arsenal to tackle problems in crucial areas such as education, poverty, and health care.

But the truth is that many of these efforts, despite best intentions, have not solved the issues they target, says Harvard Business School professor Jane Wei-Skillern. "Traditional approaches are still falling short, especially as the intensity and complexity of social problems has grown."

These persistent problems seem to demand new models and new ways of thinking to crack them, and in that spirit Wei-Skillern and her HBS colleagues James E. Austin, Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, and Howard H. Stevenson wrote the recent casebook Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector.

An entrepreneurial approach, they say, allows social organizations not only to maximize value from limited resources, but also to leverage resources beyond the organization's direct control through a creation of networks.

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We asked Wei-Skillern to discuss the book and its practical applications for business leaders.

Sean Silverthorne: Why did you and your coauthors write this book? Who is your target audience?
Jane Wei-Skillern: We wanted to take the ideas from our MBA social entrepreneurship course, which has been taught at HBS for many years, beyond the walls of the HBS classroom. The book is geared toward students with whom we would not otherwise have the opportunity to engage directly, instructors who are currently teaching or have an interest in developing social entrepreneurship courses, and last but not least, practitioners themselves, who are seeking to achieve mission impact as effectively, efficiently, and sustainably as possible.

Q: What do you mean by social entrepreneurship?
A: We define social entrepreneurship as innovative, social value-creating activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit, government, or business sectors. While virtually all enterprises, commercial and social, generate social value, fundamental to this definition is that the drive for social entrepreneurship is primarily to create social value, rather than personal or shareholder wealth.

Our definition of social entrepreneurship extends beyond more narrow definitions of social entrepreneurship that simply apply business expertise and market-based skills to nonprofits. We believe that the opportunities and challenges in the field of social entrepreneurship require not only the creative combination and adaptation of social and commercial approaches, but also the development of new conceptual frameworks and strategies tailored specifically to social value creation.

Continue Reading Jane Wei-Skillern HBS Working Knowledge

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