People with lots of ideas are often labelled as being heavy on vision but light on ground-level plowing. The social entrepreneurship movement is gaining credibility because it has become a fertile soil where vision and action meet. It has been an effective convergence of ideas where business skills, humanitarian impulses, creativity and local action come together. New frameworks have been built that are good at finding niches where traditional practices just haven’t worked. Once these niches are found, tactical responses are developed to find a working solution.

If you want to get a better sense of what this is about, there is a ten-minute video developed by the Skoll Foundation which gives a good overview of what ‘social entrepreneurship’ looks like.

My last post on the fevers of innovation pointed to the Design Thinking of places like IDEO, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and other creative enterprises that have found a way to come at traditional problems with non-traditional solutions. Social entrepreneurship is a growing body of work that supports, nurtures, and develops human-centered responses to wicked problems at all scales. There are many great resources to go to in learning about this fascinating field. Here is a rich snake-pit of links to some really interesting material.