Social Entrepreneurship

SPEAKER CRITIQUE
PRATEEK KHUBCHANDANI (001718724)

ENTR: Global Social Enterprise
11/09/2017

Speaker Critique

I attended an event on Social Innovation where Mr. Paquin would talk about his perspective of it and some of the problems faced by this industry, which prevents it from growing quickly. He starts off by trying to define social entrepreneurship but quickly starts focusing on how there is no set definition for it and it varies from person to person depending on what outcome they expect from a socially responsible enterprise. I found this very interesting as in our global social enterprise class I have come across different definitions for social entrepreneurship in the textbook but also a mixed set of definitions from my classmates. It really put into perspective as to how new a concept this is for everyone even though people and organizations have been practicing this for years. It was also interesting to see how even someone like Mr. Paquin who has researched a lot on this topic not have a set definition of his own on social innovation. This clearly shows that it is a very broad term that needs to be focused more upon.

He further emphasizes on this throughout the talk by talking about the lack of information available on this topic and mentions a lot about the ‘literature’ of social innovation. He mentions that during his research he was unable to find data on social innovation in business journals and other online forums.

One thing that stood out to me was the way he questioned social innovation. I would start off by finding a problem or asking the question ‘What problems do these people face?’. Mr. Paquin had a different approach to this, as the first question he asked was “What kind of impacts are important”. By asking this question, we are already focusing on more dire issues and are also suggesting on focusing towards a long-term impact. This is a better approach as this would focus on helping the target audience become more self-reliant and self-sustaining in the long run.

Mr. Paquin also discusses how to determine if a social enterprise is successful. He talked a lot about how many social enterprises are slammed for not being ‘social enough’ while big commercial enterprises do the bare minimum socially inclined work and are heavily praised for it when in fact we all know most of them do it as a PR stunt. This made me go back to the TOMs case we studied in class. While researching on TOMs for my paper I read a lot of online articles that slammed TOMs for not being social enough even though they are solely a social enterprise. Around the same time the media praised companies like Zara for becoming slightly eco-friendly. It shows the expectations society has from different organizations and shows a certain level of unfairness towards social enterprises. This also showed me a different problem social enterprises face, one I had never considered before. Through examples like better world books, Mr. Paquin has made me question if we have unreasonable expectations from social enterprises. With countless variables like the lack of funding makes it difficult to operate and so I think that we as a society need to lower our expectations and allow social enterprises to focus on working towards a long term solution.