We’re excited because there’s a real zeitgeist. Young people are as concerned today about making a difference as they are with making money. Social enterprises are taking off and we want to help them flourish.
- Neil Stott
Oliver Armitage wants to make bionic limbs effective and affordable for amputees everywhere. Kate Nation wants to help young women gain confidence and self-esteem through work. Riaz Moola wants to tackle the educational inequalities he saw growing up in Africa by offering programming tuition online.
Oliver, Kate and Riaz are part of a movement of entrepreneurs that’s been growing rapidly in the UK since the mid-1990s. United by a passion for addressing deep-rooted societal problems, they aren’t looking to solve them with cash, instead they want to have a positive impact through business and enterprise.
Social enterprises like the organisations that each of them runs (respectively Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems, Turtledove and Hyperion Development) are designed to improve people’s lives. According to the UK’s Department for International Trade, social enterprises also contribute £55 billion to the economy through jobs, goods, services and investing in local communities; no wonder it’s been said that “when a social enterprise profits, society profits.”
But, say Professor Paul Tracey and Dr Neil Stott, ensuring a social enterprise thrives is not always straightforward. “Doing good has increasingly been seen by government and others as the new game in town and investment and policies – including those launched by the UK government’s ‘Big Society’ in 2010 – have swiftly followed,” says Tracey, Professor of Innovation and Organisation at Cambridge Judge Business School.
“Social investment in the UK is growing by 30%, and a report last year suggested the UK is leading the way globally in effective policy around social enterprise and social investment.”
“This is of course excellent,” says Stott, who with Tracey co-directs the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation. “But we felt that there were a few problems – that the rhetoric of success and the reality were a long way apart. Social enterprises are often started with great intentions but a lack of understanding about what’s needed to make them sustainable. Too many great ideas wither and die. Everyone – policy makers, academics, practitioners – think it’s a good thing per se. We wanted to lift up the stones and see what’s underneath.
Image Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge