Changing the changemakers: How social entrepreneurship is evolving the approach to societal good and business

I was in my 3rd year of college when, frustrated by unsustainable traffic habits in my city, I tried to build a ride sharing app to motivate people to carpool and decrease pollution from cars. A student of political science at the time, I did not expect to end up in the world of tech. Throughout the years I had learned about and dreamt of working for NGOs, but I also wondered about a more self-sustainable model of work towards societal good.

A technical solution promised the possibility of alleviating a large-scale problem with an innovative approach, coupled with financial sustainability. As I will later learn, I was doing what any (social) entrepreneur did — I tried to find an innovative, scalable, sustainable solution to a larger problem I faced daily in my surroundings.

Origins of social entrepreneurship

The concept of social entrepreneurship was conceived by professor Muhammad Yunus. Challenging the traditional business model of banks, prof. Yunus decided to give microloans without collateral to the underprivileged women in Bangladesh to start their own businesses. This group of women was an unlikely candidate for loans in traditional banking, but Yunus persisted. While women around the world suffer from poverty disproportionately, statistics show that they invest the money they earn back into their families and are therefore likely to alleviate poverty in their local communities. This initiative became the Grameen Bank, a community bank now serving over 9 million people, most of whom are women.

Since then, Grameen has expanded its activities, but the founding belief stays the same — that entrepreneurial activities can tap into the expertise and lifestyle of local communities to solve social problems.

While prof. Yunus’ idea stands behind the development of the concept of social entrepreneurship, the practice itself has taken several forms and was difficult to define.

In Muhammad Yunus’ book, The World of 3 Zeroes, he encourages a transition into an economic system where social business, founded on the idea that humans are by nature selfless, creative and entrepreneurial, is the norm. Here, Yunus defines social entrepreneurship as a business activity where profit accumulation is not the only and absolute goal — the business keeps the amount of money needed to pay salaries and keep itself afloat while the rest of the profit is reinvested in scaling the social venture or into other similar ventures.

Acumen Academy, a leading school of entrepreneurship and social change, adds two crucial factors that make a venture a social one:

• A mission to impact and solve a societal problem
• A business model: identified revenue streams and tactics to create and capture value sustainably.

Therefore, the social enterprise sits between the work model of NGOs and those of traditional businesses, combining the best of both worlds to create a lasting impact.

Social entrepreneurship is innovation at the service of solving large-scale social problems. It questions the traditional way of doing business, positing that businesses can be run differently, and that their value goes beyond sheer profit accumulation. Profit is not the goal, but a necessary tool to reach the final destination — sustainable impact and better living.

The power of changing the narrative

Having grown up in a developing country, I know the ‘innovation comes from scarcity’ adage is true. When I hurt my foot as a child, my grandfather advised I use a bottle of cold water and roll it on the floor to minimize the injury. Used jars of Nutella are routinely converted into containers for food stored over winter in the Balkans. Personal bikes were used to create electricity during power outages.

This is the very idea that social entrepreneurship relies on. Creativity and innovation don’t only live in research and development departments or tech startup offices. Creativity and innovation are innate to humans and can be found everywhere — they just need support and structure to be upgraded from urgent fixes into sustainable, resilient solutions and spill the benefits over into the community.

These benefits are more than economic — social entrepreneurship lifts community spirit by changing its narrative. Yunus encourages young people pursuing his programs to think of themselves as job creators rather than job seekers. Vulnerable communities are no longer waiting for change but making it happen themselves.

Beyond poverty eradication — social entrepreneurship at the service of urban mobility

While the origins of social entrepreneurship lie in the attempt to eradicate poverty, social entrepreneurs around the world tackle a myriad of other issues — environmental issues and sustainability, gender equality, unemployment…We started and will end this article with a story about an effort to improve urban living conditions for all.

In the Sarajevan startup community, I recently met an aspiring social entrepreneur Ena.

Ena’s startup ARQLabs aims to help people who use wheelchairs move around cities safely and freely with AR-powered maps. I talked to her about the motivation behind starting a venture of this kind and what social entrepreneurship means to her, a conversation which turned into an article and won an award for the promotion of social entrepreneurship. To read the awarded article (in Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian — follow this link).

This article only opened the doors of the large, evolving topic of social entrepreneurship. Stay tuned — in the following weeks, we will explore this exciting topic in more detail!