Erik: How do you define social entrepreneurship?
Louise: Um, I define social entrepreneurship
as the people and work that attempt to use
innovation to make social change.
Erik: Yeah? And how has that understanding
of what social entrepreneurship means to you
evolved over time?
Louise: That definition use to be largely
about non-profit. For me and - I’ve come
to believe that that’s – it’s really
about all efforts whether they’re for profit
or non-profit, or for that matter governmental
and I think what’s so exciting is to actually
see the ways in which the for profit and governmental
efforts at social entrepreneurship are some
of the most exciting efforts overall – not
to take away from non-profits, obviously like
Peer Health Exchange, but I think that in
my view of how social change will occur most
effectively it will take all of those sectors
actually being social entrepreneurs to – in
various ways, people in work, to achieve change
– primarily because in the for profit world,
in particular, I think there’s the advantage
of the engine of revenue to create sort of
more scale ultimately and that if you could
map the revenue to the social change, that
would be ultimately kind of the most powerful
social entrepreneurship of all. So, there
will still be a role for non-profits to play
in filling a gap like we do in using other
assets like volunteers to play a different
role in social entrepreneurship but I think
the for profit sector in particular has a
huge opportunity to be socially entrepreneurial
in a way that it hasn’t traditionally been.
