Social Entrepreneurship in China

I have just spoken to 60 MBA students from a range of Chinese universities about social entrepreneurship. They are first round team finalists from an all-China social entrepreneurship competition sponsored by Tencent, China's largest internet provider. In this phase of the competition they attend a four-day Social Entrepreneurship Training Programme which, according to the brochure, will fuel them with ideas and resources to establish sustainable enterprises. Central to the programme will be business planning workshops to help them design buisness plans for their enterprises which will then be assessed by the competition's jurists. Winners will be given seed funding to realise their ideas. At the opening dinner, representatives from sponsoring companies Tencent ECSEL (Empowering Chinese Social Enterprise Leaders) and Bayer, spoke of their hopes for developing social entrepreneurship across China. The newly-founded China Social Entrepreneur Foundation is working hard to develop the sector in China.

Sam Lee, founder of InnoCSR and a social entrepreneur himself, told me that in May a "bunch of VCs and PEs" will meet with the 10 SEBC finalists to review their business plans and will be ready to inject cash into new start-ups. The legal system in China has not caught up with the demand for social foundations and social businesses yet so government and institutional support is lacking.

I enjoyed speaking with some budding social entrepreneurs and shared some business cases with them including the Hub and Jeffrey Wescott's wonderful ear-bud "untangler", BudSock for which I was looking for an APAC distributor. Social entrepreneurship can have both a narrow definition (for example a not-for-profit social mission to alleviate poverty and environmental degradation) or a broader one which accounts for the many market orientated enterprises which integrated a social mission within their core business. The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School at Oxford teach a strong market orientation and the "performance-driven, competitive, outlook that drives greater accountability and co-operation across sectors. Market-orientation can include anything from conventional competitive markets to the exchange of social and/or environmental value." This definition may not go down well with social entrepreneurship purists but describes well the growing industry of social enterprise.

The ongoing debate about what is and what isn't social entrepreneurship led me to construct the Social Entrepreneurship Model Matrix shown above with the cases that I used in my talk. Whatever the model, the charismatic and unstoppable drive of an entrepreneur is required and combined with a deep consideration and respect for the needs of others and the world in which we all live. Social entrepreneurship cares about people and the planet. Social entrepreneurship creates products and services with social purpose and for me social includes taking care of the environment and cultivating biodiversity to sustain us all.