Step aside, Superman, there’s a new kind of superhero in town. We’ve entered an era of heropreneurship, where reverence for the heroic social entrepreneur has led countless people to pursue a career path that promises opportunities to save the world, gain social status, and earn money, all at the same time.
In business schools across North America and Europe, the longest waiting lists—once reserved for investment banking interviews—are now shared by entrepreneurship training courses and social impact events. The coffers of social collateral have shifted, and starting a social business is at the top of the Type A student’s to-do list.
I’ve watched this shift first hand, first as an MBA student, and now through working in a business school and speaking with students at universities around the world. I’ve witnessed a significant increase in the number of students listing their career ambitions as “being a social entrepreneur”, a growing stream of new social entrepreneurship training courses, and increasing numbers of students graduating and jumping straight into launching a social venture.
[quote]My worries have grown about the way we teach, fund, and celebrate social entrepreneurship.[/quote]
As I’ve watched more and more students focus their ventures on problems they haven’t lived, such as building an app for African farmers when the founding team has neither farmed nor been to Africa, my worries have grown about the way we teach, fund, and celebrate social entrepreneurship. I wondered whether others had the same conflicting feelings as me: excitement about the good intentions, but concern about how they were manifesting. So I decided to do some research.
I conducted more than 40 interviews with educators, funders, and entrepreneurs, and had dozens of conversations with students. Many noted that the term “social entrepreneur,” which began to gain popularity more than 20 years ago, used to refer to people who had first-hand experience with a problem and went on to work on solving it. These people shifted how systems worked through collaborative cross-sector efforts, and though generating income was part of their work, their efforts and influence far outreached the size of their businesses. Many educators and funders share my concern that the focus now is on a distilled and mass-produced version of the promise of the social entrepreneur.
In this “everyone an entrepreneur” era, hack-a-thons, accelerators, business incubators, and social entrepreneurship training courses are around every corner. They mostly focus on training people with the skills they need to start a social business, neglecting the many other skills required to fully understand a problem and fuel social change.
To really change a system, I believe people need a more holistic set of skills, including systems thinking, an understanding of collaboration tools to further collective impact, and lateral leadership skills such as the ability to lead without power and to galvanize movement toward a common goal across a diverse and disjointed solutions ecosystem.
They also need a grounded understanding of themselves and their skills, such as how they like to work, which roles in a team best fit their skills, and if/how their risk tolerance fits with the range of social impact career options.
Finally, if they plan to take a leadership or strategic role in solving a problem, they need a deep understanding of the reality of that problem.
Related article: Social sector fellowships — Why they matter
Unfortunately, all too often, the people who get the funding to try their hand at solving global challenges haven’t lived those problems themselves. This comes from a range of biases. Donors, for example, often fund people they can relate to, and as the Dunning-Krugar effect explains, we often think the problems we know less about are easier to solve. [quote]People who get the funding to try their hand at solving global challenges haven’t lived those problems themselves.[/quote]The obsession with becoming “a founder” also arises from a lack of diverse educational funding programs. For example, most universities offer competitions or funding to help students start a venture, but don’t have contests and tools to support them in learning about and then “apprenticing with” the problems they care about.
We—the educators, social entrepreneurship training program designers, social impact funders, and university professors who give money and accolades to students to go out and solve problems before we’ve given them the tools to understand those problems—are largely to blame for this phenomenon. We’re wasting limited resources on shallow solutions to complex problems, and telling our students it’s okay to go out and use someone else’s time and backyard as a learning ground, without first requiring that they earn the right to take leadership on solving a problem they don’t yet understand.
My conversations led me to a number of ideas for how we could work to redirect this plethora of good intention. Here are a few:
As with any other systemic problem, tackling heropreneurship will need to be a collective effort. How do you think we can better channel good intentions into collective positive impact?
This article was originally published on Stanford Social Innovation Review; you can view it here.
It is part of a longer report that can be found here.