Social Enterprise -Hot career choice among B school graduates ? Part I
Introduction
Since starting Michael Hay's Social Entrepreneuship elective classes at London Business School, I have been fascinated and intrigued by the nature of social entrepreneurship. I have been inspired by the stories in class about people like Fazle Hasan Abed, Mohammed Yunus and Wendy Kopp as well as meeting and listening to speakers such as Andrea of Riders and Faisel Rahman of Fair Finance.
In this blog entry, I'd like to analyse why there are so few people who take up social entrepreneurship in spite of its inherent feel-good factor. We will start with a very briefly look at a typical social enterpreneur and his scope of work. We will then look at what does a B-School graduate aspire for from his education and then examine the gap.
What is a Social Enterprise? Who is a social entrepreneur and what does he do?
A Social Enterprise is an entity whose primary purpose is to fulfill unmet social needs. in the course of doing so, this enterprise may or may not generate revenues. This definition is being expanded. See here for an interesting article from the Stanford Social Innovation review.
The Ashoka foundation defines Social entrepreneurs as individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.
More definitions and information about Social Enterprises and Social Entrepreneurs can be found on the websites of the Ashoka, the Skoll Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Gates Foundation among others.
What does a social entrepreneur (SE) do?
A social entrepreneur's role includes all that of a commercial entrepreneur but with different challenges. A SE spots an unmet need in the market (major social problems) and creates a solution that can address this. The SE is then likely to create an enterprise for these purposes with the passionate belief that the solution can address the problem in a systemic manner. The SE goes through all the processes of business planning, fund-raising, organisation set-up, obtaining approvals et al. The difference lies in the nature of the challenges which mainly relate to resources - securing financial, quality human and physical resources. To explain and understand this better, I'd like to set context and digress a little bit.
Challenges
Enterprises face tremendous hurdles in raising finances - especially so when there isn't any revenue generation. In such cases, these social enterprises are effectively charities - I guess they are referred to as social enterprises since its the more 'in' thing to do so. On the other hand, enterprises which do generate revenue and are able to meet most or all of their costs qualify as social enterprises. The ideal situation is wherein a social enterprise not only addresses a large-scale social problem but also generates economic profit.
With this background, it becomes easier to understand that the nature of the challenges that face a SE are different - raising funds is expecially difficult since there are likely no returns on investment and many a times, even the capital is not returned. Budgets are typically shoe-string and this compounds the organisation set-up problem - attracting and retaining quality resources is difficult and similarly obtaining physical resources is very difficult.
What does a B-School grad look for ?
Some of the key characteristics that a B School graduate would likely look for include
- attractive compensation
- opportunities for growth
- a professional workplace
- challenging work content and opportunity to use business knowledge gained
- ability to contribute
There are many more factors that make a role/job interesting for business school students such as opportunity to travel, brand of the recruiter etc. Having invested a considerable amount of time and money in their education it is but a fair & natural expectation to have such expectations.
In the second part of this blog, we will look at potential ways of bridging this gap and pushing the envelope, what does it take for social entrepreneurship to become a career of choice among B School students.
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