Has the Social Entrepreneurship Field Come Through the Trough of Disillusionment?

At the Y Combinator seed stage web venture accelerator program, there is a famous graph about the hype cycle of emerging technology that former participants and mentors show new program members to help ground them in the ups and downs of startups. The graph starts from launch, goes up and to the right as big media and the buzz machine takes hold (the peak of inflated expectations), and then crashes into the ground as the startup gets into the messy business of turning an idea into a business. As I hang out at the Third SoCap, I wonder if our field is in the trough of disillusionment.

For the last five years, few things in the social change space have had the buzz and cache as "social entrepreneurship." Part of it is a generational thing: Millennials have seen the failures of the pure-business and the pure-activism mindsets, and are attracted to the blend. But part of it is simply that this is an idea whose time has come. People have been working for decades to prove the basic models that bring financial value and social good together, and those experiments have converged into knowledge and hit a cultural zeitgeist that is simply ready to supercharge them into the mainstream.

And supercharged the field has been. Social entrepreneurship has been exposed. Muhammed Yunus' win of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work building the microfinance field; Kiva's bringing online opportunities to get involved in the social entrepreneurship field to people's living rooms; the list goes on. The point is that there have been incredible expectations -- perhaps a peak of inflated expectations, to use the hype cycle terminology.

Yet in the two years since the financial world collapsed, and the prognosticators claimed that now was the time for social entrepreneurship and social business, the reality is that the field hasn't gone mainstream. Most investors still do not think primarily in terms of social and economic value. Most entrepreneurs continue to create businesses outside this space. Even the high expectation of the Obama Administrations' much-vaunted embrace of social innovation have been somewhat flubbed.

And there has been some disillusionment. I've seen many young entrepreneurs veer away from the field rather than diving deep because of it. The good news is what comes after the trough of disillusionment. It is the "slope of enlightenment," when the new technology begins to have figured out enough about how it intersects with the real world -- outside the hype cycle --  to actually get traction and change things in a meaningful way.

I'm not sure whether we're through the trough of disillusionment or not. This field feels like its starting to get past its own hype, there's more and more doing (although also still a lot of talking) and I think that's positive. Only time will tell where we go next, but if there is something of a diminished hype, I think it's a positive and necessary step toward a field fully unleashed.