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Mar 25, 2011

Social Entrepreneurs

My wife and I are visiting Chicago for a couple of days, it has been five years since I was here last. We visited the Institute of Art this morning and especially enjoyed the new section on contemporary art.

It is however a good time to talk about Social Entrepreneurship and list three interesting cases. Before that I should say that "Social Entrepreneurship" is a difficult concept to define. But I would argue that the distinctive characteristic of a social entrepreneur is that she has set as her primary objective to face and help reduce a social problem, making profits are a means to this goal.

Arguably, an entrepreneur, who is not "social," has a different objective: to maximizes profits. This is, however, controversial because as this book claims, one of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, social or not, is that they want to make a positive change in the word.

In any case, like the saying goes, I can't define social entrepreneurship but I can recognize it when I see it.

And these are three examples:

1) An initiative to design and build $ 300 houses for people living in slums. 

Until later!

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