Entrepreneur, as defined by its first 180 years of use, referred to people who spent their life serving others, social progress as well as developing economic health. They were passionate about innovations that responded to real need and ensuring that markets transparently empowered human progress. Around the time that my father popularised the word with his Entrepreneurial Revolution Trilogy in The Economist (1976-1984), Americans started changing the definition of entrepreneur to include people only interested in taking money. Consequently it has become necessary to add adjectives to entrepreneur - such as sustainability, social, service to differentiate entrepreneurship that is compounding future value for all participants in a market exchange from this who are just taking money out. We discuss this further at grameen.tv Here we reproduce part of an interview with David Bornstein- an author who has spent the last decade writing up the biographies of his favourite entrepreneurs- Muhammad Yunus at Grameen, and the 2000 social entrepreneur network invested in over the last 30 years by Bill Drayton of Ashoka. All of these players are fundamental guides in this decade's number 1 challenge to all world citizens - urgently change the world of economics in time to sustain future generations.
Following article is extracted from the inspiring web out of S. Africa ISOPH Institute
Regarding Grameen Bank, Bornstein notes:
The role of micro credit has only been ensconced as an idea that’s not going away in the last decade. In the 1990s, it really took off. But if you look at the growth of micro credit since 1997, when there were 7 million people receiving micro loans, and today, when there may be as many as 70 million, according to the micro credit summit campaign, that’s an enormous growth…. In 1997, when the Grameen Bank represented almost a third of the entire micro credit field, it would have been an enormous setback for the industry if the bank went away. Today, the Grameen Bank’s borrowers represent only a small percentage--under 5 percent--of total micro credit clients. The main role of the bank today is not demonstrating the viability of the idea, but reminding the new bankers to keep their focus on very poor clients, not just clients who are easier to bank with.
The important factor is not the organizations that are created to support an idea but what they represent: the initial insight into how to address a problem or tap into new possibilities. Bornstein elaborates:
What you’re really talking about is the creativity, the innovation. You’re not just talking about creating an organization. Anybody can create an organization. You’re talking about the qualities that the entrepreneurs have, constantly looking for new opportunities, seizing changes, responding to new possibilities, and continually pushing an organization to reach beyond where it’s been. Those things can definitely be lost. If Steven Jobs had died of cancer when Apple Computer was a year old, it’s very possible that that whole idea--democratizing access to these powerful information tools--would have faltered and had to wait for another champion. And who knows how long it would have taken? Those are the sorts of questions you need crystal balls to answer.
Listening and Learning
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| Jeroo Billimoria, founder of Childline, a 24-hour emergency response system for children in distress |
Social entrepreneurs create a vision for a better world and then plan for that future. How do they do it, without crystal balls?“Entrepreneurs are really famous listeners,” Bornstein notes. “Almost everybody who’s done research on the entrepreneur notes the fact that you have these people who are very humble when it comes to listening to others and yet very aggressive when it comes to pursuing their own ideas.”
For Bornstein, listening is key to what entrepreneurs ultimately achieve. “The deep listening is really the deep learning--learning from others and integrating the perspectives of others and really understanding how everything works and constantly changing your map of the world based on a conversation you just had.”
While listening and learning are important to the development of the entrepreneur and her idea, listening and learning are also essential to spreading the great ideas that already exist.
How do we resolve ethnic conflict? How do we teach disgruntled youth who have dropped out of high school? How do we get them to recognize their potential and to want to be motivated to participate in society? How do we create opportunities for disabled people around the world? These are things that have been demonstrated in parts of the world and in such a way that their ideas are very useful to other people. We haven’t yet created mechanisms to spread these ideas, these blueprints. People don’t look for them; there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel going on right now.
To capitalize on the ideas that exist, “Learning is the next major challenge. We need learning more than we need more social entrepreneurship now. We have a lot of useful models out there now that have no where near reached their potential in terms of where they could go.”
Bornstein sees blueprints, franchise models, and replicable systems as the best potential growth area for the citizen sector: “The beauty of having social entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs is that not everybody has to invent new models. Not everybody has to be supremely innovative and have boundless energy.”
Businesses fail at a rate of at least 50 percent, but franchises fail less than 20 percent of the time, and some, as little as 10 percent. For Bornstein, this is a strong testimony to the value of documenting and disseminating ideas and strategies. “The role of the entrepreneur is to develop a new idea and demonstrate it forcefully, undeniably, then create the system so that idea can get out there in the world where other people can take it up and run with it,” Bornstein asserts.
What Can Be Learned Now
Effectively disseminating existing ideas and specific strategies is the next big challenge, as Bornstein notes, but what can be learned now from and about social entrepreneurship in general?
There is a lot the citizen sector can share, especially with for-profit businesses, Bornstein believes.
What I think the nonprofit sector has going for it is distribution channels; there are very large markets around the world that the business sector knows nothing about. All those micro credit organizations, they’re reaching 70 million families. Every year, if they’re successful, the purchasing power of those families increases. People like Fabio Rosa [a social entrepreneur who works on affordable rural electrification in Brazil] are developing low-cost systems to rent poor people solar panels, and when the clients get electricity, they’re going to buy water pumps, TVs, electric showers. Ultimately businesses are going to want to sell to these people, but it’s the social entrepreneurs who understand right now how to find these people and serve them, and that’s an enormous advantage they have…. Social entrepreneurs are constantly defying the assumptions about what kinds of things are possible and doable at large scale. This is an enormous potential source of opportunity for the business sector.
Despite Bornstein’s articulation of what the citizen sector has to offer, mainstream thinking tends to encourage nonprofits to learn from for-profits, to become more business-like. There are two primary reasons. One, the for-profit sector is older: “Business is a much more mature sector. When more mature sectors meet less mature sectors, there’s the assumption that they have more to teach.”
Two, “The reason why the knowledge direction is historically one-way is just a function of the wealth and prestige of the two sectors,” Bornstein explains. “The business sector is considered a ‘real’ sector; it has huge amounts of money, employs the bulk of people in society, and it’s where the power is.”
When the nonprofit sector is perceived as a second-class sector, a “respect gap” is created:
That respect gap has led to the fact that the sectors haven’t worked very well together. Social entrepreneurs are the best way to break down that respect gap and build bridges because everybody respects them. Take Muhammad Yunus [founder of the Grameen Bank]--whether you’re running a Fortune 500 company or a nonprofit, you can see that this man is clearly a terrific entrepreneur; he’s brought tremendous changes. The social entrepreneurs who are really able to build up remarkable organizations can grab the attention of people in all the different sectors and get them to focus their eyes on what’s possible, and that’s the best way to bring people together.
When asked if it’s possible to learn how to change the world, Bornstein emphatically agrees, Bornstein uses Childline, a 24-hour emergency response system for children in distress as an example. Childline has grown from its first office in Bombay in 1996 to 55 Indian cities today, and efforts are now underway to develop the model in Africa and other locations.
“Can we change the world? Can we learn how to change the world?” Bornstein answers, “There are hundreds and hundreds of examples of systems people have developed around the world that don’t require the entrepreneur any more because they’ve been systematized, and they’ve been spread to different locations and implemented by different people who are not the original founders--so you know that this idea, or model, is sound; it works. We can accelerate social innovation considerably by making concerted efforts to look for and analyze these ‘blueprints’ and then build communication channels to disseminate them far and wide.”
