Social entrepreneurship - Essay Example

While this aspect may seem obvious, the distinction interests me deeply because of social entrepreneurship’s potential to produce breakthrough outputs that could solve the perennial social problems such as income disparity, monopolies and so on. We should remember that we have been under some economic systems but our world is still confronted with issues such poverty, exploitation and so forth. In the course of my studies and research in this field, I have come across a lot of business models that sought to define what constitutes business and its purpose.

There has been some degree of confusion for me since it seemed logical and reasonable to follow the popular economic theories, such as those of Milton Friedman’s which place profit as the main objective of a business’ existence. This was where things got interesting because the concept of the social entrepreneur disproved some widely accepted notions, say, in terms of the stakeholders in an enterprise. For the traditional business people, the sole stakeholder in a business organization is the stockholder or the owner of the capital and that the management is working for his benefit.

In social entrepreneurship, the stakeholder is not only the entrepreneur but they include the community, the employees, their clients and all the participants in the organization and its operation. The attributes cited by William Drayton, which differentiates an entrepreneur from the social entrepreneur further underscores my point: “Social entrepreneurs have the same core temperament as their industry-creating, business entrepreneur peers but instead, use their talents to solve social problems.

” (Drayton, 2002) If this concept would be refined into a successful business model and integrated in the mainstream, then there is a chance of a radical positive change not just in business but in the society as well. In line with the previously mentioned “pearl” the second important point that I would like to discuss