Social Entrepreneurship: Solving Problems and Creating Impact

Running head: BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
1
MBA assignment
Student’s name
Name of institution
Course
Date

BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
2
Introduction
Social entrepreneurship can be defined as starting up companies in order to get solutions to
environmental, social and cultural related problems, the success of social enterprises is measured
in terms of its benefit to the society. It is connected to voluntary sector covering fields like;
community development, poverty reduction, and health care. The main difference of business
entreprenuers and social entreprenuers is that business entreprenuers focuses more on profit
making while social entreprenuers focuses on society welfare. Profit- making enterprises can
also be part of social entrepreneurship, giving an example of an organization intending to
provide employment may decide to run a restaurant that will offer employment opportunities and
also make profits. Social entrepreneurs look for problems in the society, tries to understand them
and finally comes up with an innovative idea to provide solutions to the problems. They may be
faced by a number of challenges and the main one being lack of funds to run their enterprises,
this is because most investor fear investing on social enterprises. Their motivation is the need to
provide solutions to problems in the society.(Dees, 2017).
Literature review
Many researchers have defined social entrepreneurship in different ways, but they all have one
thing in common which is the nature of solving problems in social entrepreneurship. It involves
developing plans and implementing them to benefit the society. Social entrepreneurs are not
happy about the number of people who walk into their offices but the number of people that walk
out having benefited, they get their motivation to start social enterprises from challenges,
previous experience, social problems, and social networks. Some researchers define social
entrepreneurship more deeply and claim that social entrepreneurship can occur in non-profit

BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
3
making companies, public or private organizations. These researchers emphasize the
innovativeness and creativity brought by the entrepreneurs to solve the problems uniquely
instead of focusing on the benefits of the products and services provided (Cepel, Stasiukynas,
Kotásková & Dvorsky, 2018).
Social entrepreneurship has several characteristics which include: creativity, impact to the
society, and ethical fiber. Creativity has two dimensions one being the ability to solve problems
and the other being the ability to set achievable goals. Entrepreneurs need to be creative enough
to get solutions to questions and have should a vision of the society when the ideas are
implemented. They have to work on goal-setting to ensure that the vision come to reality. The
impact on the society is used to determine if the idea to be implemented will bring changes to the
situation of the society even with the absence of the founder. Importance of ethical fiber is that
entrepreneurs who want to positively change society must be honest and trustworthy. Social
entrepreneurs are also characterized by not taking credit after making change; they believe that
the move was successful due to everybody around them (Audretsch, Belitski & Desai, 2018).
Social entrepreneurs are faced by a number of challenges one of them being, the way they deal
with predicted or less-researched issues such as overpopulation, food shortages among others,
and this makes it hard to found a successful business on possible solutions because investors are
not ready to get involved such kind of risky activities. They are generally unsuccessful because
they offer assistance to those not able to pay for it, capitalism is based on an exchange of money
for products and services, and social entrepreneurs have to look for business models which don’t
rely on capitalism to sustain their organizations. It is the self-sustainability that differentiates the
social enterprises from charities which depend on donations for survival (Singh & Gaur, 2018).