New Strategies for a Sustainable Society: The Growing Contribution of Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 to Mohammad Yunus for founding the Grameen Bank thrust social e trepreneurship into the global spotlight. The Grameen Bank is the world's largest micro-finance organization: it is a profitable business that has helped thousands of people, mostly women, out of poverty. Social entrepreneurship. the simultaneous pursuit of economic, social, and environmental goals by enterprising ventures, has gradually found a place on the world's stage as a human response to social and environmental problems. The capacity of indi viduals and communities to self-organize into groups and associations in order to provide the goods and services they need has been around for a very long time, but the emergence of more enterprising social ventures which aim to achieve financial sustainability has only recently attracted the attention of scholars. Social entrepre neurship combines the economic benefits of entrepreneurship with the delivery of social and environmental outcomes, and has the potential to assist the economic and social development of individuals and societies around the world. Social entrepreneurship is first and foremost a practical response to unmet individual and societal needs. The natural inclination for people to contribute to the common good, and to help others less well off. has led to innovative responses to human deprivation and environmental degradation. Responses that include an entrepreneurial dimension are creating the new institutional field of social entre