The Shape of "Social Entrepreneurship" at PopTech

One of the central questions in the growth of the field of social entrepreneurship is whether the term and framework of "social entrepreneurship" will persist, or whether we will look back and see it instead as an intellectual and organizational movement that influenced other fields without becoming one on its own. The annual PopTech conference in Camden, Maine suggests that the question might be a "both/and" rather than an "and/or".

PopTech is a network of cross-disciplinary thinkers and doers with a creative problem solving and social innovation. Throughout the year, PopTech convenes actors from different fields to work together on significant challenges, and the community is anchored by their annual conference in Camden, Maine.

The conference, which I'm attending this week, runs four days and is replete with talks, performances, and unexpected social encounters. While content appears king from the outside, however, the conference is also the seat for two of the most innovative parts of the PopTech platform, their Social Innovation Fellows program and their Science and Public Leadership Fellows program, a new partnership designed to help give brilliant scientists the media chops and savvy they need to better share their work with the public at large.

The Social Innovation Fellows program is in its third year, and is distinguished by the seriousness of its curricular program. For a full week before the larger conference begins, the selected entrepreneurs live in Camden and receive basically nonstop training, mentorship and support from designers, public speaking experts, social impact measurement folks, and more. The program has included social ventures like Global Citizen Year, Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, and Samasource.

In many ways, the program demonstrates why having a "social entrepreneurship" field is so valuable. The projects represent an extremely diverse set of problems and approaches to change, but benefit from a curriculum that is overarching and reflects the needs of early stage socially focused ventures.

Yet at the same time, what happens after the Fellows program ends shows why the social entrepreneurship field shouldn't shirk it's overlap and potentials to integrate with the larger fields of business and science. Throughout the four days of he Maine conference, the Fellows give five minute presentations to the entire audience which end up being some of the best content of the event. This sparks conversations and partnerships with senior execs at well established companies that simply wouldn't come from an event purely focused on social entrepreneurship.

The lesson, I think, is that the field is young, but perhaps at the exciting moment where its beginning to have enough of sense of itself that it can interact with the larger fields that drive business and society, not with fear of assimilation but of excitement of mutual influence.

Photos: whiteafrican