An Entrepreneur Is a Person Who Commences Projects or ActivitiesIntroductionAn entrepreneur is a person who commences any projects or activities, which stimulate economic growth by creating, managing and developing something new or by exploiting the available resources and technologies to produce a new product. For them to do so they must be vigilant in identifying the best opportunities, they must formulate a good business plan and determine the resources with which the opportunities are to be exploited. The entrepreneur must employ efficient staff and control systems, which enable the business to function smoothly and resolve any complications quickly (Dees, 1998). Although entrepreneurs are agents of change and growth in the market economy, there are some kinds of them who make significant changes to the communities and societies by proffering innovation solutions to social problems. Just as business entrepreneurs create and transform whole industries, social entrepreneurs act as the change factors for society, seizing opportunities others miss in order to refine systems, invent and promulgate new approaches and advance sustainable solutions that create social value (Zahra et al, 2009).
According to Schumpeter, innovation need not necessarily involve creating something new, but also using existing ideas and concepts in a new venture. Therefore social entrepreneurs are agents who seek to strengthen social wealth by innovatively establishing new ventures or by effectively managing the existing ones. Unlike traditional business entrepreneurs and majority of non-profit organizations, social entrepreneurs seek to generate long-term change in the society rather than profits and small-scale results. Social entrepreneurship is about identifying the basic underlying problem and, selecting and embracing an appropriate mission that would have a persistent impact on the society. The entrepreneur must be ready to make the necessary changes by innovating new prototypes and initiating
The Problem
Social entrepreneurship will need to be a very high-quality project, as in the past, but it will inevitably take some time to build such a success.
In my view these goals are usually based on an unrealistic sense of being out of control, which is why I think there will be problems and obstacles with this approach. In my experience, there are times when entrepreneurs have actually solved the challenge which I have identified: they’ve been able to improve the social space of the society – for a good portion of the population, this is very important
Now these problems and obstacles will arise only in the short-term.
In the long-term the problem you want to see addressed or overcome, will be to create a social movement that has significant political or social power and that is willing to go out and change the society’s current status quo
We will see the first example of this very real phenomenon. In the early ’80s a group of local and national socialists published a popular book entitled “People’s Communes (Wages, Hours, and Taxes)”, a reference to ‘Socialism for Social Activism’. The result was a political manifesto to change the working-class society. They argued that:
We think socialism, the new type of socialism used for ‘political action’, is only really possible when the economy is structured and the workers in society are organised, which means there is an equality between the workers as members in society and that they are entitled to their wages, hours and working conditions for whatever they choose. It’s also possible for working class revolutionaries to take over management of economic and social affairs and to organize political parties. (Wages, Hours, and Taxes)
This kind of socialist movement would not end for good, only in the long run. Yet a small number of social entrepreneurs actually do become “socialists” by virtue of their new social and political aspirations. Many of them are at the same time social democrats who are opposed to the old social order by social means.
The Problem is of the Social
The problem with social entrepreneurship is that it may not be particularly effective at the long-term, but it may well be of the social-political sphere.
Social entrepreneurs are, in my opinion, really only successful once they have been built sufficiently that they are able to build the social spaces they need. A lot of social entrepreneurs do not understand how to make their lives better, and this may lead them to feel alienated from the community and the communities surrounding them. The community is extremely difficult to manage, and the social movement has to be built from the bottom up, not from the top down – not only to improve the social infrastructure, but also the way in which social issues are tackled. People become more and more emotionally attached to the social movements they are joining because they are more dependent on the movement, on the message and ideas that we read about the social movements we join, and on people’s commitment to that movement. The problem here is that the majority of the social movements people have come to join don’t work in concrete ways.
To address this, I have argued that, rather than focusing on making social activism much more accessible, it may be wise for people to spend more time in social