The Search for Social Entrepreneurship

2. Building Sites

30 The study of business and social entrepreneurship has long focused on newness. Study after study has defined entrepreneurship as the creation of a new venture, almost always a small business, family firm, or organization . When new ventures emerge from existing organizations, researchers have sometimes labeled it “intrapreneurship.” It is an easy way to distinguish ideas developed by new ventures from those created by existing organizations. Intrapreneurship has never quite caught on as a term, however, in part because it is generally defined as a form of entrepreneurship that just happens to occur in a different place. My recent search of the ProQuest database of academic research found just 73 articles on intrapreneurship between 1970 and 2008, compared with 5,784 on entrepreneurship. One reason that the term intrapreneurship is rarely used could be that it has come to be known by a different name—corporate entrepreneurship . Writing in 1990, for example, Howard Stevenson and Carlos Jarillo argued that corporate entrepreneurship had become one of the fastest growing topics in the business school literature: “Yet, when reading much of the literature on entrepreneurship as such, to which corporate entrepreneurship should be somewhat related (perhaps as is a species to its genus), one finds an implicit definition of entrepreneurship as something which is radically different from corporate management . Indeed, some writers find it to be the opposite of corporate CHAPTER TWO BUILDING SITES 02 5211-0 ch2 7/13/08 6:52 PM Page 30 31 BUILDING SITES management.”1 As they concluded, corporate entrepreneurship is often viewed “as something of an oxymoron.” This is certainly the dominant view in the field of social entrepreneurship . Building in part of the business literature, which often focuses on small business, the field appears to be unalterably convinced that social entrepreneurship only springs from new ventures, in part because new ventures are easier to launch and in part because existing organizations are so difficult to change. Consider how Moshe Sharir and Miri Lerner described Israeli social entrepreneurs in 2006: “Like business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs establish new organizations, develop and implement innovative programs, and organize or distribute new services. Even though they are differently motivated, the challenges and problems social entrepreneurs face during the initiation, establishment and institutionalization of their ventures resemble those faced by business entrepreneurs.”2 Defined as such, one measure of entrepreneurial success is the simple existence of a social benefit organization. (Recall that I use social benefit organization instead of nonprofit out of respect for Bill Drayton’s request that we stop defining charitable organizations by what they are not.) Despite the odds against success for new ventures, many scholars tend to believe that only new ventures have the agility to respond to entrepreneurial opportunities, refine and launch innovative ideas, and exploit what Drayton calls “jujitsu” leverage points needed for success. “Existing institutions are not able to make such judgments or operate on this timescale,” Drayton wrote in his 2007 letter to the Stanford Social Innovation Review.3 Yet there is ample evidence that existing organizations built by social entrepreneurs continue to produce pattern-breaking change over long periods of time. Although their initial organization may have started from scratch, entrepreneurs often add to their portfolios of social innovation as these platforms develop the capacity for new ideas along different paths to have an impact. There is also compelling evidence that existing social benefit organizations built decades, even a century or two, ago can create and maintain entrepreneurial cultures that produce social entrepreneurship, 1. Stevenson and Jarillo (1990, p. 17). 2. Sharir and Lerner (2006, p. 7). 3. Drayton (2007, p. 5). 02 5211-0 ch2 7/13/08 6:52 PM Page 31 whether as an adjunct to their primary enterprise or as part of an organization -wide transformation. These organizations create the conditions under which new ideas develop and grow, often becoming businesses within a business after being housed in an organizational incubator of some kind. Simply put, if organizations such as Environmental Defense or Share Our Strength continue to produce innovative ideas decades after their founding, it seems reasonable to assume that existing organizations such as CARE might be able to produce innovations at even older ages. A pattern -breaking idea is a pattern-breaking idea, no matter where it comes from or when it arises. Creating such ideas may be much more difficult within an existing organization, but ample examples exist in the social benefit...