The Book Club: Professor Rob Mitchell
The Book Club is Textbooks for Change’s guest blog series featuring stories and advice from our partners, mentors, students, and friends. This week we feature Professor Rob Mitchell, the Donald G. & Elizabeth R. Ness Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School, Western University.
A few weeks ago was Global Entrepreneurship Week! As part of celebrating entrepreneurship, I gave the keynote talk at the WesternU: Startup Showcase, which was hosted by the Western Founders Network, Nspire Innovation Network, and the Western Student Entrepreneurship Center. The event highlighted the great work of a number of startups in London and their entrepreneurial opportunities.
Some of the showcase start-ups were “traditional” ventures and some of them were social ventures. When thinking about social ventures, we often forget that these are ventures. They are businesses — businesses that seek to achieve a social purpose in addition to their business purpose. Both traditional and social businesses are similar in a number of ways when it comes to the entrepreneurial opportunity. Let me describe some of these.
For starters, both traditional and social ventures need (what I call) “a good sandbox.” A sandbox represents the boundaries of the space an entrepreneur wants to be in. Both traditional and social ventures will want their sandbox to be big. They will want to have lots of room in which to iterate and develop their initial ideas.
Why? It is because your initial idea is not likely going to be your best idea. Instead, your initial idea is only a seed. You would not eat a seed instead of an apple, anymore than you should simply take your first idea and run with it. Instead it needs to grow. This is true for traditional ventures as well as social ventures. In both cases, you need to be clear about the gap you are seeking to solve. That is:
1. What is the problem/gap?
2. Who has this problem/gap?
3. Why is this a problem/gap?
You need to answer all three before settling on How you can solve this problem. And unlike the sandbox, which you want to be very big, a startup (with limited resources) will want the problem/gap to be very specific. Note that specific solution does not mean small entrepreneurial opportunity. Instead, specificity gives you a platform that you can use to grow and sustain the business. Such sustaining is essential.
For social ventures, the ones that sustain and survive are the ones that have a sufficiently precise definition of the problems/gaps they address. They are clear about the what, who and why questions in their problem/gap statements such that they can offer a How (solution) that enables the venture to survive. That is, they serve an important social good by creating some product or service that other people buy. That is, to survive, they need profit. And like in traditional start-up ventures, profit is a good thing. Indeed, for social ventures, it is an even better thing: it sustains the accomplishment of the important, social purpose of the venture for a long, long time! That also deserves celebration.
