4th Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship

Where is innovation happening and how do we get more of it, was the question this year's Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship aimed to answer. Held in Oxford in late March, it attracted nearly 700 people from more than 40 countries.

Does social entrepreneurship focus too much on individuals? Innovation comes from every quarter, Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation reminded us. Behind every individual is a team, and much social change is driven by movements. While Bill Drayton of Ashoka insisted that ‘everyone’s a changemaker’, John Elkington of SustainAbility cautioned against focusing too much on a ‘few heroic individuals’.

There was much talk of a blurring of the sectors. Mark Kramer (FSG Social Impact Advisors) foresees a merging of the for-profit and non-profit sectors and suggests that social entrepreneurship is a first step towards this. But Lester Salamon (Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies) favours cooperation rather than merger and fears that the blurring of sector boundaries poses a threat to non-profit mission as organizations face decisions as to whether to pursue better-off paying customers or poor clients.

A similar blurring is taking place among donors, argued management guru Charles Handy. New philanthropists can be seen as ‘seedlings of a changing type of capitalism’, happily combining self-interest and sympathy. Muhammad Yunus, too, spoke of the need for a ‘new kind of business’, social business, citing Grameen Danone and the Aravind eye-care hospital as two examples. They will need new kinds of investor, happy to get back the money they have invested but to receive no dividends.

While the Forum highlighted the development of a range of new finance mechanisms, raising funds clearly remains a huge problem for social entrepreneurs. Whatever scale the new humanistic capitalism achieves, though, it will have its limitations. ‘The best way to design goods for poor people is to find out what they want and what they’re prepared to pay,’ said Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund. But, she added, ‘some may not be able to pay at all. We need philanthropic money still.’