Does Social Entrepreneurship Have an Ambition Problem?

On Friday I judged the final round of the Stanford BASES Social E-Challenge. The projects were great, and I was happy to see Indian leadership development corps Avanti Fellows and Aqua Cresco, a company bringing to market a new irrigation technology, take the top two spots. Still, in almost every single presentation I thought that the startups were under-reaching. Does social entrepreneurship have an ambition problem?

The concept of "scale" is at the heart of many people's definition of social entrepreneurship. The field is meant to produce organizations with transformational potential across the scope of a problem. At the same time, traditional community development and local nonprofit folks sometimes bristle (reasonably) at the notion that their work is somehow less important because they're not trying to replicate their model in every city, and worry that when scale becomes a fetish for our field, we get sloppy about the local involvement and ownership necessary to make programs work in the long run.

I share the concern about local adaptation, and I don't think its wise to behave as though only one type of social change effort matters.

That said, we're facing seriously huge problems. And in the democratic capitalist system, philanthropy is often left to be a cleanup for the excess and inequality of the supersystem. Rather than getting to spend talent and energy and changing systems, philanthropic organizations end up picking up the tab for environmental "externalities," underdeveloped urban systems, and kids who can't afford medicine.

My investment in social entrepreneurship is largely an investment in routing a generation of entrepreneurs to think about their potential to disrupt the companies, industries, and modes of behavior that create and perpetuate these problems in the first place.

That doesn't mean I don't think we need community organizations that aren't looking much beyond their boundaries, and it doesn't mean I don't believe in the importance of philanthropic and charitable organizations that are focused on making sure people don't fall through the cracks of the system we have today.

What it means is that I'm interested in pushing people who have the will, capacity, ideas, and interest in building the most powerful, disruptive companies they can. The goal of the field of social entrepreneurship can't, I don't think, be building 20% better nonprofits and social enterprises. I think it has to be about creating fundamentally better models of doing business that leverage entrepreneurial energy and a smart passion for social justice to reshape their larger industries in fundamental ways.

In the case of BASES, all of the finalist had good ideas and good teams, but they almost all could have been striving for more. One organization had a great idea for leveraging students to end food waste on campus, but should be thinking from day one about what they have to contribute to the larger system that creates food waste. Another organization wants to bring to market a technology that could dramatically change the way soil stores water, in the process making crop land yield more and turning arid land into arable land. But they are only asking for a modest amount of money and presented a reasonably slow growth plan.

One possibility is that these organizations and others like them choose not to move as aggressively as they could because they genuinely believe that a slow model is necessary for their goals, or because they're only interested in a small piece of their problem.

But another, more worrying possibility is that they believed that the judges of the competition wanted to hear conservative, sensible estimates of what they could do, worried that they would seem overambitious and unreasonable otherwise.

If that's the case we have a serious problem on our hands. The idea that a group of judges which included the founder of not-unambitious organizations like Kiva.org would be looking for sensibility and conservatism of plans to make the world a better place is just nuts. But it's also not surprising.

I think that our field needs to up the ante a bit and be a force that constantly makes people feel as though they can go as big as their ambition would take them. Our support structures shouldn't limit or block out changemakers that don't want to achieve giant scale, but for those that might, we should be high-fiving them for what they've accomplished so far and then giving them sixteen cases of Red Bull to be released out into the world with even bigger goals.

Photo credit: *eddie