Is there a growing disenchantment with Social Entrepreneurship?
“Social entrepreneurship, which can be defined as doing well while doing good. The problem is that social entrepreneurs usually end up doing neither. This is not to say that companies should always maximize profits to the exclusion of everything else. But companies should have a specific mission. They should be solving some discrete, important problem. Social entrepreneurship fails that test. It has an incredible ambiguity to it. Is it actually good for society? Or is it simply approved of by society? Those are very different questions. If they are not—if what is good is simply what the masses approve of—progress is very doubtful, since everyone will end up doing more or less the same thing. Everyone will have a solar startup. Each will have some story about how theirs is slightly different. But query whether those are meaningful differences or just eccentric ones. In vast, competitive markets you often end up with mimetic competition.”
