MGT 410
Paper II
This paper is going to focus on social entrepreneurship and how it can help us to understand and lessen current global and environmental degradation. First, let’s talk about what exactly is social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship is basically the attempt to draw upon business techniques to find solutions to social problems. When talking about social entrepreneurship in relation to how it can lessen the deterioration of the environment, it’s important to think about citizen sector organizations.
Drayton and Budinich discuss that citizen sector organizations are the millions of groups that are established and run by mission oriented individuals across the globe who are attempting to address social needs. Today, it has become more and more popular to see CSOs teaming up with for profit organizations. Why would they do this you may ask? Because both of them bring their own strengths to the table that, when combined, can deal with large scale problems that they wouldn’t be able to do on their own.
For profit organizations bring a larger scale, expertise, and financing, while the CSOs bring lower costs, strong social networks, as well as knowing more about their customers and their communities. When these two work together they are gaining a competitive edge. When they are working together they are helping mitigate environmental degradation as well as growing their businesses.
Another concept for this is hybrid value chains or HVCs. HVCs is a new operating framework for transforming markets by leveraging the strengths of business and social actors. HVCs spread across the economic spectrum and represent a systematic change in the way business and CSOs interact.
Drayton and Budinich talk about three kinds of returns businesses get when they enter into a HVC. The first one is profits. HVCs open up many opportunities for growth. The second one is knowledge. When companies pioneer HVCs they will jump up the learning curve and leave...