Summary
Contents
Subject index
While the phrase ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ sounds oxymoronic, it certainly is not an unfamiliar concept in the Indian market and society. India is a hub of social entrepreneurship and has a long history of doing business for social causes. The business giants like Amul, Aravind Eyecare, Lijjat, Sulabh Shauchalay, etc. have been solving social problems through entrepreneurial strategies since ages. Inspired by tech giants like Uber or Paytm, aspiring entrepreneurs are looking for problems that can be solved through new business ideas. The emergence of social entrepreneurship as an identifiable sector and as a discipline/field of study has become a social phenomenon. The book starts with tracing the historical roots and the milestone which have led to the recent emergence of social entrepreneurship as a recognized sector of practice and study. Rather than fitting ‘social entrepreneurs’ in a box, it identifies the qualities and patterns of successful social entrepreneurs, both as a person and how they function. Sifting through these diverse approaches to solve social problems, it proposes five broad but distinct types of Indian social entrepreneurs. It describes how social entrepreneurs, like any other entrepreneur, identify opportunities and gaps in the ‘market’, develop innovative solutions to address those problems, and use entrepreneurial strategies to build and scale their ventures.It also discuss the key problems of access to basic social goods (e.g., education, healthcare, credit, etc.) by the poor segment of Indian society, the challenges in servicing this segment and successful entrepreneurial models which social entrepreneurs use to impact their lives. As scaling the impact is an essential requirement for the social entrepreneurs to make a difference in the society and lives of people, the book also discusses three different ways in which social entrepreneurs scale, and the prerequisites and challenges in scaling.
Quarter Idealism and a Pound of Pragmatism
Quarter Idealism and a Pound of Pragmatism
Indeed, one of the primary functions of the social entrepreneur is to serve as a kind of social alchemist: to create new social compounds; to gather together people's ideas, experiences, skills, and resources in configurations that society is not naturally aligned to produce.
—David Bornstein (2004)
Social entrepreneurs, first and foremost, are agents of social change. They are passionate about solving critical social problem(s) of their community/society and use entrepreneurial strategies to develop and implement innovative and sustainable solutions. This requires from them the romantic optimism of a dreamer as well as the hard-headed pragmatism of a realist. They work towards realizing an imagined ideal future which does not exist, while at the ...
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