Social Entrepreneurship in India: Its Perspective and Practice

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is essentially identifying and exploiting opportunities to create wealth. Social entrepreneurship is a work of social entrepreneur who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make sustainable social change. Social entrepreneur is different from business entrepreneur in the sense that the former assesses it success in terms of the impact s/he has made on society / humanity whereas the latter measures her/ his performance in terms of profit and return. While a business entrepreneur can create entirely new business enterprise, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to daunting social problems and then implements them on a large scale for the benefit of the humanity. Although the terms are relatively new, both social entrepreneur and social entrepreneurship are found throughout history. The name of Florance Nightangale (founder of the first nursing school and developer of modern nursing practices), Robert Owen (founder of cooperative movement), Vinoba Bhave (founder of India's Land Gift Movement), and Muhammad Yunus (founder of Bangaladesh's Grameen Bank) are historically noteworthy social entrepreneurs whose work exemplifies classic social entrepreneurship. Though the concept of social entrepreneurship is gaining increasing popularity, it still means different things to different people like not-for-profit organization starting for profit or starting organization for not-for-profit or organization discharging social responsibility. Our view is that failing to define social entrepreneurship precisely would make the subject too wide and open rendering it confusing and essentially meaningless. It is against this backdrop, the present paper makes an attempt give a clear and precise definition of social entrepreneurship based on its perspective and practices with special reference to India.