Why Solve Anything Other Than a Great Big Problem?

One of the most important resources the social entrepreneurship field has, believe it or not, are entrepreneurs with social aims who don't associate themselves with the field at all. If we're looking for ways to push the "beyond profit" mentality into the mainstream, I'm making a bet on this unaligned cohort.

Check out this video from Supercool School at the annual DEMO pitch conference in Palm Springs, CA (embedded below). Think about the words it uses. They want to "decentralize and democratize education the whole industry, by empowering everyone to create an online school with the simple click of a button." While the investors at DEMO may have heard "industry disruption = big profits," I know for a fact that the entrepreneurs behind Supercool School are thinking, "Here is a great big problem that must be solved. Let's do it."

And the problems with our education system are exactly the type that demand entrepreneurship. To stop strip-mining children for particular aptitudes, to help teach students now only how to read but to love to read and to prepare a new generation for the technical challenge of a new era -- as well as the moral challenges that accompany it -- we have to have a revolution.

That revolution needs to invoke a paradigm shift. It means we have to stop thinking about education as something that only happens between 9-2pm on school days. It means we have to move from a Manichean teacher vs. student perspective to the assumption that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn. The revolution also needs a mechanism that enables people to live the new paradigm. It needs a commons in which everyone is a student and everyone is a teacher, and where people who were failed by "traditional" education can find their love of learning.

That's the fence that Supercool School is swinging for. They're not interested in providing a nice place to learn a class or two online. They're not trying to build a great system for virtual corporate training that may have some application elsewhere, as well. They want to fucking fix education. Period.

What is the place for them in the social entrepreneurship movement? The entrepreneurs behind Supercool School don't read the Stanford Social Innovation Review. They don't go to the Skoll World Forum. But they sure as hell share the sense that we need big fundamental change to solve big fundamental problems. If we don't find a place for people like them, I think we're missing a big bet.

The broader point extends beyond social enterprise and cuts right to the core of the next generation of entrepreneurs. The way I see it, we need to be asking: Why solve anything other than a great big problem?

When I see a new web startup trying to increase click-thru ad-rates by 10%, it breaks my heart a little. It's not that what they're doing is wrong. But I just can't help but feel like I'm seeing incredible entrepreneurial talent wasted on something that fundamentally doesn't matter much.

Of course that's my bias. It's incredibly dangerous to begin telling people what types of startups are or aren't valuable. Supercool School proves that you don't have to be affiliated with a social movement to create social value. Social value is not always just about solving social problems. The overall growth of the economy is, with the right protections, generally a good thing.

But at the end of the day, the monstrous challenges we face demand such insane amounts of creativity that we need all hands on deck. I can't help but believe that the potential upside -- from the standpoint of personal satisfaction, social impact and in many cases, financial return -- is just so much bigger when you're tackling problems at the heart of what it means to live, work, think, learn and act in the 21st century.

Photo credit: Anonymous9000