CASE tackles social problems

Visiting scholar Greg Dees addressed students and faculty at a lecture entitled "Social entrepreneurship: An emerging field in higher education" on Sept. 19. Dees is a professor in the practice of social entrepreneurship and nonprofit management and a founding faculty director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. "It all began in the 1980s," Dees said, when two types of thinking emerged that approached social problems in new ways. The first type was social enterprise and the second was social innovation. Social enterprise involves nonprofit organizations that are concerned about inadequate funding for social problems. To solve the underfunding problem, the administrators of these organizations used the social problem of unemployment as a business opportunity. These social entrepreneurs would start a bakery, for example, and use the homeless or unemployed as workers. In this way, the employees would benefit from having a stable job, and the bakery would bring in a profit that would allow the administrators to continue their service; it was a self-sustaining profit. Social innovation, the second type of new thinking that developed in the 1980s, involved finding new and creative ways to solve social problems, especially those found in developing countries. Mohammed Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in social innovation, where he used his knowledge of microcredit to provide impoverished Indian entrepreneurs with loans that would normally be considered too small for a traditional bank to award. Eventually these two ways of thinking converged and became social entrepreneurship. This type of business uses entrepreneurial principles to create new business ventures to facilitate social change. However, the new development has many challenges to overcome. First, scholars have trouble defining the term "social entrepreneurship." A simple definition of the term is a study that combines business with social objectives. But for Harvard Business School this definition is "too soft" and for liberal arts colleges this definition is "too business-like." A second problem that faces the field of social entrepreneurship is one of measuring the success of ventures. "We don't know a lot about the field," Dees, who has spent over 15 years working in social entrepreneurship, said. "It only has a brief history." Because of this, more research needs to be conducted to show whether social entrepreneurship is having a beneficiary impact on the world's social problems. According to Dees there needs to be new theoretical frameworks or models to strengthen the practice and implementation of social entrepreneurship. Additionally, Dees challenged colleges and universities to build stronger interdisciplinary communities in order to further the practice and knowledge of social entrepreneurship. Despite the challenges that his field needs to overcome, Dees expressed hope for the future of social entrepreneurship. He described how the study can be applied to a wide range of interests, including economic, environmental, ecological and sociological. New business ventures can benefit the world's social problems in all of these areas. Dees thinks his research is an important area of study to develop because social entrepreneurs attempt to find the most effective tools for solving social problems. Dees praised the innovation required in the field of social entrepreneurship. Because the world's social problems have not been solved, students need to think of more creative solutions. "It is an important step in the right direction," Dees said.

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