Social Entrepreneurship vs. Social Innovation - Social Innovators

When did you first hear about social entrepreneurship or social enterprise? Not long ago. Now, according to Stanford’s Social Innovation Review, social entrepreneurship is old talk. What really matters today is social innovation. This really leaves me wondering if we are just playing around with words. But Stanford being Stanford, they almost got me convinced. If you have been following, I covered a discussion about social entrepreneurship with some definitions from trusted sources. I wrote that a social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. At my time of writing, which was about three days ago, I was trying to understand the mechanics of social entrepreneurship when someone dropped the bomb saying social entrepreneurship is old business. And that’s when I went hunting for the real difference between innovation and entrepreneurship, which brings me to this discussion.

Let’s indulge ourselves in the definition of innovation. Innovation-: the act or process of inventing or introducing something new: new idea or method: a new invention or way of doing something.

Looking back at the definition of entrepreneurship, it is so apparent that social entrepreneurship cleans after social innovation by organizing whatever it is that has been proposed as the way forward of solving a social problem. Truth is both innovators and entrepreneurs are needed. But it seems entrepreneurs act on the propositions of innovators. Innovators first. Entrepreneurs next.