Idea in Brief
The Problem
Economically marginalized segments of society are often too small to create the political or commercial opportunities necessary to improve their condition. Social ventures offer a way around this problem.
The Challenge
To be effective, social ventures must be financially sustainable so that the benefits they provide do not depend on a constant flow of subsidies from taxpayers or charitable givers.
The Solution
A study of 91 social ventures reviewed for the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (SASE) suggests that projects succeed when they change two features of an existing socioeconomic system: the actors involved and the enabling technologies applied.
Social entrepreneurship has emerged over the past several decades as a way to identify and bring about potentially transformative societal change. A hybrid of government intervention and pure business entrepreneurship, social ventures can address problems that are too narrow in scope to spark legislative activism or to attract private capital.