From Melinda Marcus:

Over the past few days I have realized that my view on social entrepreneurship (SE) is very small. To gain a broader view of the “social entrepreneurship” world, I have decided to see how academia and the professional world defines the phenomena of SE.

J. Gregory Dees, Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and Non-profit Management at Duke University has identified five characteristics of successful social entrepreneurs in his book, Enterprising Nonprofits:  A Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs:

• Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value)
• Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission
• Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning
• Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
• Exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.

Okay, so basically to be a social entrepreneur, all it takes is passion, connections, and not being afraid of failure. Easy, if your biggest fear isn’t failure (like mine!).

The Peace Corps has even started a Peace Corps entrepreneurs blog on the popular Social Edge site.  According to a Nationl Peace Corps Association news page, "These Peace Corps entrepreneurs exemplify what our community is fundamentally about--innovation leading to change that makes a difference.” This difference is what they consider to be social entrepreneurship.

As I dug a little deeper I found an interesting article, Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition, by Roger L. Martin and Sally Osberg. They “believe that appropriating entrepreneurship for the term social entrepreneurship requires wrestling with what we actually mean by entrepreneurship. Is it simply alertness to opportunity? Creativity? Determination?... [These questions] are not the whole story.”

So what is the whole story? If professors and highly educated people are still figuring out the definition of SE, then how am I to know as well?

In his Social Edge blog, Let There Be Light, NYU Professor Paul Light struggles with this same question: “The challenge is not to define social entrepreneurship so broadly that it becomes just another word that gets bandied about in funding proposals and niche building…At the same time, social entrepreneurship should not be defined so narrowly that it becomes the province of the special few…”

If you are like I am, you are reading this and seeing that the common thread among all of this is helping people live better lives. But can’t everyone help people live a better lives in some way or another? 

Most companies have the good of their customers at the center of the business. So then, the question still remains, WHAT IS SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP?

I think I need to change the questions I posed in my previous entry, Definition Quest. I need to find out what sets SE apart in the business world. I need to understand what difference SE is truly making.
So these are the questions I would like to ask local businesses and organizations:

1. What is your definition of social entrepreneurship? What makes it different from entrepreneurship?
2. How does your company truly change the community? How does it make a social difference?
3. Where does your passion stem from?
4. Why are you in the sector you are in, for-profit or not-for-profit? In terms of social entrepreneurship, how is it an advantage and a disadvantage?
5. And in keeping with a social entrepreneurship goal of Handshake 2.0 – to contribute to local community and economic development - how has the community here in the New River Valley helped further your cause and how have you helped it become more socially aware?

Melinda Marcus is an intern for Handshake 2.0, a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks, located in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, a technology park, a research park, and a science park on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia.  The research park provides high-technology companies access to university faculty, university facilities, university equipment, and business-related support services.  The Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center fosters commercialization and technology transfer of university research for both high-tech start-up companies and established technology businesses.