<< Previous Interview  |  Next Interview >>

"The Power of New Ideas"

A Guest Column by David Bornstein,
Author of How to Change the World

(First appeared in The Stanford Daily, 1/18/2005)

David Bornstein is the award-winning author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and The Power of New Ideas, and The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank. His articles have appeared in both national and international news media.

A few nights ago, I made the mistake of turning on the TV news. As promised, in twenty-two minutes I was “given the world” – that is, a world dominated by partisan politics, terrorism and war. I turned off the TV and resolved to stay away.

It’s not that I can’t handle bad news. When I turn on the TV news, I’m hoping to gain a better understanding of the world in all its ugliness and beauty. The problem is that the image of the “world” that gets beamed into my home is like a badly doctored photograph: like an image of a forest in which most of the trees have been edited out. The desolate landscape left behind, I’m informed, is “reality.” To me, this impoverished depiction of the world – omitting vast stretches of human activity – is worse than useless; it is deadening.

But there is a hidden world out there that is very exciting. I have spent the past five years traveling around the globe, getting a glimpse of this world through the eyes of a hundred “social entrepreneurs” who are successfully advancing large-scale social changes in their societies. There is a great deal that is powerful and “newsworthy” that we do not hear about.

In India, for example, a child-protection network called Childline, founded by a social worker, has provided emergency assistance to hundreds of thousands of street children and spread to 55 cities. In South Africa, an organization called Tateni Home Care Services, founded by a nurse, has trained thousands of unemployed youth as home-care attendants – advancing a simple model for delivering compassionate care to people with AIDS and orphaned children across the country. In Hungary, an organization called the Alliance Industrial Union, founded by the mother of a disabled child, has launched a network of 21 assisted living and working centers for people with severe disabilities. In the United States, a Washington, D.C.-based organization called College Summit, founded by a former divinity student, has helped thousands of low-income students enroll in college (with an 80 percent retention rate), and is now working with the public schools in several cities to rebuild their college guidance systems.

Each of these organizations was founded by an ordinary citizen; each was built up largely over the past eight years; and each represents a fundamentally new approach, a new model, for solving a particular social problem in a given context. In fact, judging from the millions of new organizations founded in recent years by citizens around the world seeking to address social problems, there are vastly more social entrepreneurs out there than terrorists; and their impact is both wider and deeper. But we rarely hear about their work. What I have seen watching the social entrepreneurs for five years, I don’t think I would have seen if I had watched the TV news, or read the newspapers every day, for fifty.

As with any new field, there is considerable debate about what constitutes “social entrepreneurship.” While some people hold that a social entrepreneur is someone who uses “business skills” to achieve “social ends,” others hold that a social entrepreneur is someone who runs a nonprofit organization that “generates revenues” to support its “mission.” Still, others argue that social entrepreneurs create businesses that pursue “double- or “triple-bottom line” returns. While each of these characterizations illustrates something that a social entrepreneur may do, none captures the essence of what a social entrepreneur is – because social entrepreneurs are not defined by their strategies, tools or skills, but by their vision, motivation and ethics.

Social entrepreneurs serve the same functions vis-à-vis social change as business entrepreneurs do vis-à-vis economic change: they seize opportunities, gather resources, build organizations, overcome resistance; and, through a multi-decade process of marketing and continual adjustment, they gradually change patterns in their industries and open up new opportunities for others.

From a global perspective, the emergence of the field of social entrepreneurship represents a fundamental reorganization of society – and therefore presents widespread opportunities for everyone. What has happened is that the sector of society concerned with “social value” – a sector that for centuries has been run much like a “command economy” – is beginning to resemble a market economy, comprised of many young, decentralized, flexible institutions created by entrepreneurs. The result is a kind of “creative chaos” with countless self-motivated citizens attacking problems in new ways, learning how to connect with one another, and with businesses and governments.

The personal side to this story is that, everywhere, people share similar desires: they love to build things; they enjoy working with inspiring colleagues; they seek to use their talents in ways that bring security and recognition; they want to have some fun and feel that their work is meaningful. Of course, not everyone would want to be a social entrepreneur, just as not everyone wants to start a business. But today everyone has the option to work in this field. Because it is growing so fast and in so many directions, the opportunities are wide open for people with diverse interests and skills. So if you happen to be someone who would like to combine what you are good at, what you enjoy doing and what you care about – and get to do it every day – that’s news worth watching.

Wow, great article. How can I read them all?

All the interviews with outstanding social entrepreneurs and articles have been collected into a report on social innovation. It is available below for easy reading, printing, and sharing.

The Story of Social Innovation:
Interviews with Social Entrepreneurs