Initiation Brainstorms #6: Social Entrepreneurship @ NOVA

Initiation Brainstorms #6: Social Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship day@Clube ENOVA
NOVA, Lisbon - 8 June 2024
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Summary

Goal: Launch initiation brainstorms across academia to foster the early awareness of social entrepreneurship and the creation of new ventures, especially among graduate and undergraduate students. The entrepreneurship days will be promoted and organized with students associations, clubs and others student initiatives, in close cooperation with the technology transfer offices. The ultimate goal is to foster knowledge building about entrepreneurship in academia.

Social Entrepreneurship

Over the past two decades, the citizen sector has discovered what the business sector learned long ago: There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.

Filipe Santos from INSEAD believes that the often-used concept of the double bottom-line of economic value and social value is misleading. Value is a holistic concept that cannot be partitioned. The difference between social entrepreneurs and business or commercial entrepreneurs is not economic versus social. The difference is their focus on value creation versus value appropriation. “The goal for some entrepreneurs is to appropriate value,” he says. “You get the upside of your market niche for the corporate owners or for yourself. This will lead them to focus on activities where value appropriation is easier”. But the goal of social entrepreneurs is not to appropriate value but to create it.

Dr. Scott Sherman will address “The Science of Making the World a Better Place”: What separates the most successful social change campaigns from those that fail? Dr. Sherman spent seven years researching how people win when they are trying to change the world. In this presentation, he talks about his surprising findings. Most of the traditional attempts to change the world, including politics, law, and even science, were unsuccessful. The most successful strategies looked much like the new field of social entrepreneurship. In this short presentation, Dr. Sherman will discuss why social entrepreneurship is one of the most promising ways to change the world.

Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss and improving systems, inventing new approaches, and creating solutions to change society for the better.