Sophie is a renowned theorist as well as an empiricist and educator on issues of social entrepreneurship.   Anita began the conversation by asking Sophie about what she is learning about how social entrepreneurs can “change systems” to improve the lives of those who are often excluded.

For the first 15 years of Sophie’s research in this area, she focused on the individual who played the role of the social entrepreneur to ask questions about when this type of initiative works, how to finance it, and how to succeed in it.  And Sophie continues her work in this domain.

Over the most recent five years, she has focused on community engagement of the social entrepreneur at several levels:  with the impacted individuals, and also with the impacted community.  This raises opportunities to apply human-centered design thinking to validate ideas rather than to push tech and other western-drive solutions into low-income settings.

Sophie has written about how financial returns on investment are not incompatible with social impact.   Should social entrepreneurs plan for a financial return on investment?  Or is this something that comes later as a result of doing good?

Sophie offered a guarded “yes” in answering these questions.  You can expect a financial ROI, and in fact the reduction of impact into a viable business model is what makes this entrepreneurship (in contrast, say, to an NGO).  But investors have diverse ROI equations.  Some investors want social change.   Others are willing to wait.  Yet others want to hit minimum guardrail levels and then want social good.  One area where Sophie feels there is an immediate potential for financial ROI is green tech, but this is only because of the long history of risk-taking among prior entrepreneurs in this space.   Lots depends on the sector that you are in.

But win-win is indeed possible.

Some Pi2 conversations have raised questions about whether Westernized curriculum on entrepreneurship is problematic.  Tim Weiss, Rob Nason, and Robert Eberhart, for example, have all expressed concerns that entrepreneurship training can expose trainees to criminality, loss of trust, and exclusion from community.  Do you worry about that?

Sophie’s contributions in this area center on a new model of five different types of community:  geographic, identity-based, interest-based, practice, and fated (such as through natural disaster).  Within each of these communities, there may be lots of heterogeneity, though.  And the communities may overlap within the individual (i.e., you may identify as a scientist based on your practice and as a Belgian based on your geography).

Work by colleagues such as Rob Nason and Tim Weiss and Robert Eberhart has also raised questions about whether conventional entrepreneurship – which emphasizes beating your peers and achieving competitive advantage – makes any sense at all within communities of people who are deeply collaborative and interdependent.  Sophie’s work also relates to this conceptualization of how the community may be the target of social entrepreneurship rather than the individual.

Sophie has a forthcoming paper with the provocative title of “The Dark Side of Doing Good:  A Guiding Framework for Advancing Research on the Negative Outcomes of Social Entrepreneurship.”   What is the dark side?   How can we understand it better? 

The dark side relates first to the importance of understanding beneficiaries of social initiatives better.  We need to understand better those whose lives we want to change.   Many entrepreneurs and development agencies have to go down a steep learning curve before they can be effective.

We need better organizational design.  No more playpumps!  We need to make sure that failed social entrepreneurship doesn’t hurt those we want to help.

What does Sophie want you to think about?

1.      What is the impact that you are having?   What is your company or organization doing that is having an impact on vulnerable and marginalized people.

2.      Don’t do social entrepreneurship alone.  Find allies.  Look for partners and collaborators.