Social enterprises today

This blog entry will be a bit extraordinary. Though this blog is a news blog, I would like to write an introduction about what social enterprises are all about. I try to summarise it by my own words even if I keep reading the resources on the Internet and the books about social entrepreneurship.

 In my opinion, while speaking about social enterprises we must emphasise two main factors: the people and the impact. Social enterprises have social impact, so they face the challenges of the world and offer a solution to the issues. However, they are real enterprises which mean they work as usual enterprises in some ways. Their business is functioning similar to normal enterprises. The difference is that the success of social enterprises is measured in a different way.

Social enterprise solutions represent a wide variety of solutions on social impact. I think almost everyone have heard about microfinancing. The name behind microfinancing is Muhammad Younus. He is a Nobel Prize winner, founder of Grameen Bank that lends small amount of money to the poor. He has achieved enormous success starting with not more than $27. It is quiet unbelievable, isn’t it?

The forms of social impact can be microfinancing, helping poor people build their existence (not in form of donations, only giving them the opportunity to work or produce food, for example, or even start an enterprise. Other forms of social impact involve improvements and innovations of education and health. Don’t forget that 3 billion people of the world are living their life in poverty, most of them in hunger. Also many millions of men and women are illiterate, and also many suffer from hard diseases. Therefore the education and the supply with clean water give inevitable challenge to charitable social enterprises to solve the issues.

Innovation is as important as the above mentioned activities. I should tell you that in my opinion the innovation is not a crucial and inevitable part of social enterprises. However, I must admit that in the new age of Internet and technology, the number of innovative solutions at the field of social enterprises increased significantly. I know others have different opinion: they say that innovation is one of the most important parts of the social enterprises. I think the fight against poverty, starvation and diseases is more important.

This summary is only a short introduction of what is the topic of social enterprises all about. If you are interested and need more information please follow and read my blog, I will publish many resources from the web, so you can read and implement much information.

Note that this blog will be a news blog, so you will find bunch of information right here. Feel free to share and comment if you have an idea to tell me, follow me on Twitter or add me to a google+ circle.