The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship by J Gregory Dees

In the Wikipedia entry, the term is defined:

Social entrepreneurship is about developing social innovation through entrepreneurial solutions. A social entrepreneur takes notice of a social problem or need, decides to passionately pursue it, creatively innovates new solutions and entrepreneurially addresses the issue through an organised ‘business plan’ approach, thus allowing the social entrepreneur to address the issue of sustainability of the social venture undertaken.

Note that the concepts of “business plan” and “sustainability” in the definition. It is important that social enterprises are run like any private companies with both the profit and socially responsible motives. However, like any other company, the social enterprise has to declare its assets and profits to the shareholders (for example, donors) and be audited like a normal company.

I have attached an interesting article by J Gregory Dees, entitled “The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship” and will be able to provide more information to the readers on this subject.

Of course, this has raised considerable amount of debate in Singapore, where NKF wanted both ways: it claims to be a social enterprise but it refuses to discloses its accounts. In the end, it backfired on them and it invoked a public outrage towards them. I believe that the NKF issue has been discussed by several blogs (for example, Singapore Angle, Heavenly-Sword, Oikono and etc.) I don’t intend this thread to be focussed on the NKF issue.

There is one dimension of the social enterprise which I find interesting that it’s seriously a cultural divide. In Asian society, we associate the people who are running these charities, to be of low pay and possess integrity and strong moral values, whereas, in the western culture, it does not matter whether the characters running are of high pay and have the same moral fibre, as long as these people aligned their “profit” motive with the success of the charity foundation. In some sense, it’s very similar to “the ends justify the means” approach.

Here will my question to the readers: Can social enterpreneurship be possible in Singapore if the model adopts a profit motive for the management?