Santa Clara University

Just six months in to my new role as Executive Director for the Center for Science, Technology, and Society here in the heart of Silicon Valley, I am still the “new kid on the block” in the social entrepreneurship universe. Our focus at the Center is promoting the use of science and technology to benefit underserved populations worldwide, and the primary means by which we promote are through entrepreneurship and innovation. Specifically, we focus on helping social entrepreneurs build sustainable and scalable ventures through our pioneering Global Social Benefit Incubator™ program, now entering its 9^th year, and more recently through the Frugal Innovation Lab initiative, a vision of my colleague Radha Basu.

One advantage of being the new kid is the opportunity to look at the neighborhood through a different lens. Another is to profess naïvete, often borne of genuine ignorance of the tremendous body of knowledge amassed by brilliant people around the world. With that caveat, how we can help entrepreneurs and innovators scale the best solutions to create impact at the level of the issues affecting poor communities around the world?

I know some incredibly intelligent folks who think in multiple dimensions; I’m limited to three. At my nascent stage of understanding, the axes are: technology, business model, and context. Technology innovations for social benefit are often considered in terms of the goods or services they provide to the poor. On a trip to visit social entrepreneurs in India in January, I observed that two very different needs—clean water and off-grid energy—could better scale through technology innovations enabling measurement and transactions. How do we foster, reward, and honor technology innovations throughout the value chain?

After more than a quarter of a century in Silicon Valley, it’s easy to think of business models in that vernacular: let’s make it as big of an enterprise as we can, as quickly as we can, to maximize the present value of our bottom line, be that single, double, or triple. I’ve met a lot of social entrepreneurs who are most passionate about serving communities they know personally—that’s anecdotal, not statistical. Moreover, mechanisms for accrual of benefits from scale through replication or franchising to the original entrepreneur or innovator are less evident in theory or practice. What are the right incentives for “open source” social entrepreneurship and who needs to “play”?

Assuming one can identify the best technology innovation to solve a particular social problem and the right business model for building a sustainable and scalable venture (or ventures), there are a number of other contextual factors that influence whether or not the venture will be successful. In the realm of genetics, these were referred to under the umbrella of ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues). The people who live in the house down the street, or in this case the faculty in the building across the green on campus, look at the universe and the neighborhood through different lenses. How do we encourage meaningful research to identify success factors in social entrepreneurship based on sociological, cultural, political, and other contextual factors?