Features Of Social Entrepreneurship

Social Entrepreneurship Social entrepreneurship can be described as entrepreneurship that aims to provide innovative solutions to unresolved social problems. Therefore, it often goes hand in hand with social innovation activities, aimed at improving people’s lives by encouraging social changes. Social entrepreneurs link themselves to a wide spectrum of organizations that have an commercial approach and whose overall primary mission is to tackle social problems. Social entrepreneurship is, therefore, about solving social problems rather than exploiting market opportunities.

Historical examples Although the term “social entrepreneurship” is quite new in our society but the concept is centuries old. Social entrepreneurship in the 19th – 20th Centuries remained more or less a continuation of the movement that started in the 18th Century. The pioneers of social entrepreneurship in the 19th Century include many renowned personalities. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) - Perhaps the most famous social entrepreneur in history, she founded the world’s first nursing school and developed modern nursing practices. No doubt there were many more prominent examples, but it is interesting to see what the situation is like today.

Social Entrepreneurship Nowadays

While economic sustainability is needed in order to pursue the social mission of social entrepreneurship programs, the creation of social value is the essential feature of the initiatives, for the social entrepreneur’s principal aim is to produce social change. To be more specific, the originality represented by social enterprises and social entrepreneurship is that the economic value serves social purposes. In this sense, social entrepreneurship generates “combined value that consists of economic, social and environmental value components” (Emerson,