The Search for Social Entrepreneurship

6. Comparing Activity

169 Investing in social entrepreneurship will always rely on instinct—no matter how precise the plan, investors and entrepreneurs both must make leaps of faith as they move forward. They can produce and evaluate reams of data, but the eventual decision to launch involves a fundamental belief that the new combination has promise. The leap of faith may be informed, but it is still a leap. Letting go of rules, taking risks, and trusting others involve a leap of faith. Faith can be deeply grounded in rigorous analysis and tightly linked to past experience, but sooner or later, every innovation involves a decision to take the organization beyond the realm of known experience . If that organization has been disciplined about its work, it should be ready for the uncertainty ahead. Having done everything possible to anticipate the risks, however, some highly socially entrepreneurial organizations will take the leap only to find themselves standing at the edge of the canyon. It helps enormously if they have packed a parachute at the start of their journey. Luckily, entrepreneurs do not need to be great prophets to create change, though some might argue that Muhammad Yunus is just that. But entrepreneurs do need to have faith that the prevailing wisdom can be changed. No matter how much cost-benefit analysis the organization pours into its decision, no matter how many evaluators and auditors it brings to the task, it must eventually make a leap of faith. It is part of the entrepreneurial quality. CHAPTER SIX COMPARING ACTIVITY 06 5211-0 ch6 7/13/08 6:54 PM Page 169 Unfortunately, it is impossible to measure the hopeful imagination that underpins social entrepreneurship. The best one can do is to identify the conditions that make leaps of faith possible, which was the ultimate purpose of my survey of the high-performing organizations. By searching for statistically significant differences between levels of socially entrepreneurial activity, I hoped to disprove the hypothesis that there is no difference between the three groups—that highly socially entrepreneurial organizations are, indeed, different from their less socially entrepreneurial peers. The search for differences is based primarily on the 2006 survey of the 131 high-performing social benefit organizations. In addition, the 2001 survey of the 250 high performing social benefit organizations provides at least some additional insights on the assumptions embedded in the definition of social entrepreneurship. A comparison of major findings from the 131 social benefit organizations that participated in the 2001 and 2006 surveys can be found in appendix B, while the 2006 survey is included in its entirety with comparisons of the responses from the highly, moderately, and not-too socially entrepreneurial organizations in appendix C. With responses from senior executives at 131 social benefit organizations , the 2006 sample dwarfs much of the research in a field that has generally focused on relatively small numbers of reasonably well-known cases. However, even a sample of 131 cases is still too small for the kind of sophisticated statistical analysis often found in larger surveys. Recall that the margin of error in the 2006 survey for comparisons among the organizations that were coded as highly, moderately, or not-too entrepreneurial is plus or minus 9 percent, meaning that any given answer could be 9 percentage points higher or lower than reported. Such a high margin of error means that it is nearly impossible to make comparisons within the three subgroups—one cannot ask with any confidence , for example, whether the thirty-four organizations that were coded as highly socially entrepreneurial are different from each other on a host of key questions, such as the role of visionary leadership in achieving impact or the level of sophistication in management systems. Nevertheless , analysis of the 131 responses offers an opportunity to explore significant differences and tendencies among the reputed high-performing social benefit organizations. In turn, these results provide ample insights on what might be found in a larger sample of high performers and can help guide future comparative surveys of organizations engaged 170 COMPARING ACTIVITY 06 5211-0 ch6 7/13/08 6:54 PM Page 170 in high- and low-impact social change. Such a survey would not start with high performers but with impact, thereby identifying potential lever points that would help investors and practitioners alike identify opportunities for solving intractable problems. In this regard, there are similarities and differences among the three groups of organizations...