unintended confusion: “social”
Studying social entrepreneurship in business school sometimes led to confusion - people unfamiliar with the term often thought it meant something about entrepreneurs that were cooperative rather than competitive.
Working up our mission statement and “what is social enterprise?” text for the Social Enterprise Network of the Triangle (SENT) website brought in more complexity as there are differing definitions for “social enterprise” vs. “social entrepreneurship” and while some of this is academic, it is helpful to be precise about who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish.
While I was a big booster of the term “the social sector” over other options such as “the fourth sector” (business, non-profits and government being the first three with the fourth being those that have hybrid forms or missions) when I was in school, at that time when you heard “social impact” it was rather clear that people were talking about impact on society. And while the potential for people to associate terms like social impact, social sector and social innovation with old-school direct service organizations like the Department of Social Services was a potential negative, things were still relatively clear.
Of course, this was back in 2003, before the advent of social media. Now we have a few folks who show up to social enterprise events thinking we’re going to be talking about getting rich creating iPhone apps. So you’ll understand my reverse confusion (and excitement) when I saw via friendfeed that @fredwilson was commenting on Chris Dixon’s post “You need to use social services to understand them.” I was expecting the same sort of discussion that happened with the “Hacking Education” conference, but instead it was a discussion of whether VCs and Angels can invest in (or diss) social media companies without using them.
Though it does bring up an interesting thought. Should those looking to fix social services have to try using them? I think some of the folks who bash welfare, bankruptcy and other government assistance would perhaps change their perspective if forced to actually go through the process themselves.
