Genesis and Development of Social Entrepreneurship in India

Background

Peter Drucker argues that social entrepreneurs “...change the performance capacity of society” (Gendron, 1996, p. 37) while Henton, Douglas, Melville and Walesh (1997) write about ‘civic entrepreneurs’ as “...a new generation of leaders who forge new, powerfully productive linkages at the intersection of business, government, education and community”. Social entrepreneurs are reformers and revolutionaries with a social mission. They make basic changes to the way things are done in the social sector. The social entrepreneurs provide distinctive solutions for some new and some old problems. Social entrepreneurs see the world in a different manner. They give and provide sustainable improvements to the present day problems. So, what business entrepreneurs are to the economy, social entrepreneurs are to society? They may, like business entrepreneurs, be interested in profit, but their emphasis is on social change. They are often self-driven, creative individuals who exploit new opportunities, question accepted norms, and refuse to give up until they have remade the world for the better (Austin, Stevenson & Wei-Skillern, 2006). According to Schumpeter (1975), social entrepreneurs are very innovative and ought to be innovative as they are on the mission of providing new methods of solving problems that were holding the society since some time. Many at times it is said that social entrepreneurs are a special breed of people providing different solutions. But, the journey of social entrepreneurs is not a smooth one. Social entrepreneurship can shortly be described as a construct that bridges business and benevolence by applying entrepreneurship in the social sphere (Roberts & Woods, 2005). Where traditional entrepreneurship involves the identification, evaluation and exploration of opportunities in order to gain personal or shareholder wealth, social entrepreneurs recognise, evaluate and exploit opportunities that results in social value (Certo & Miller, 2008; Austin, Stevenson, & Wei-Skillern, 2006).