National Innovation Advisory Council: A Snub for Social Entrepreneurs?

Yesterday, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced the full member list of the new National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. While I might normally be excited about this sort of thing, I can't help read this list and think that social entrepreneurship got a big snub.

The council is designed to give the government better access to some of the best minds in the business of creating new companies. With an unemployment rate that just won't go down across the country, part of the idea of convening groups like this is to ensure that the entrepreneurial engine of the USA keeps firing to create a new generation of jobs.

Ultimately, it's hard to know how valuable these groups are. But they do create a context that can help influence the perception elected officials have about what is important to spur entrepreneurial job creation. And when it comes to that sort of influence, who is on the panel matters.

There are two things that I think a stronger social entrepreneur presence on this panel would do:

1. Focus attention on social problems where there are entrepreneurial opportunities. After spending a year in Silicon Valley, one of the biggest gaps in the for-profit entrepreneurship space I see is the limited perception of which problems are valuable (in a monetary sense) to solve. There are an insane number of companies being started to do social gaming, virtual currency, or group buying, because those are clear, strong markets with the potential for outsized financial returns. There are less education startups, health care delivery startups, or generally companies working on distinctly social problems.

I don't believe that we should prescribe what type of problem any particular individual should try to solve -- for anyone to be a successful entrepreneur, it has to come from their guts. Overall, however, I don't think there is enough of a push from investors and mentors for young entrepreneurs to think about the social problems they could be building big businesses with social impact around.

2. Focus on changing our conversation about how business is done. When we talk about shaping a new generation of entrepreneurship, we have the opportunity to shape not just what businesses are created, but how they're created, and how they view their roles and responsibilities as agents of societal improvement. There are massive, massive gains to be had in how young entrepreneurs today treat the sustainability of their sourcing partners, their environmental impact, their worker cultures and more. But those things won't just wish themselves into existence, and there are always going to be cost pressures cutting against those sort of social-focuses. Having social entrepreneurs as an integral part of this conversation could ensure not only that these conversations were on the table, but that members of the government were thinking about how to better support businesses that built social impact into their DNA from day one.

This is not a critique of the members of this list. And indeed, there are a number of folks on this list who understand the connection between entrepreneurship and social good. AOL and Case Foundation founder Steve Case, for example, is no social innovation slouch. Case will be co-chairing the committee, which is promising.

But the point is that the perspective of social entrepreneurs, who have build their business up from the day one thinking about how to maximize social good as well as profit, has far too little representation. Intentional or not, I think that's a major missed opportunity for the government, and ultimately, for us all.

Photo Credit: AIM Neutron (On a break)