10 Ideas Driving The Future Of Social Entrepreneurship!

The 10th Annual Skoll World Forum, which brought together several hundred of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs to Oxford, has  wrapped for another year. The Forum serves as a useful barometer for how the climate of social enterprise is changing.

When it launched in 2004, it was all about celebrating the unknown social entrepreneurs, helping give them global recognition and credibility, and a platform to engage with policy leaders and large corporations.

In that task, it has succeeded brilliantly–over the past decade, social enterprise has become mainstream. Jeff Skoll picks out the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus in 2006 as a watershed moment, followed equally significantly in the following year by the award to Al Gore.

So 10 years in, what’s the current thinking? What new big idea now dominates the agenda and concerns of the Forum participants? And where do they think this field is going?

1: IT’S ABOUT CHANGING THE SYSTEM, STUPID.
Broadcaster Ray Suarez expressed it eloquently when he said, “Nobody ever comes out and says they are in favor of starving children, or inadequate sanitation, or war and conflict. And yet they persist. So how is it that if no-one is for these things, and everyone is against them, these problems continue?”

Everyone at the Forum was in some way wrestling with that question. Whether it was this year’s Skoll awardee Carne Ross, whose organization Independent Diplomat is seeking to turn the closed, rigged game of international diplomacy on its head, orSalman Khan’s Khan Academy whose new model of free, online tuition is re-shaping how education is delivered, system change is the new game in town.

2: CHANGE IS ACCELERATING
In “Dare to Imagine,” the film from the Forum’s Opening Plenary, a theoretical physicist, a publisher, a neuroscientist, a technologist, a social financier, and a young science prodigy speculate on the next 50 years ahead. All agree on one thing – that the old, incremental way of tackling problems won’t work anymore; that we need to radically imagine new ways of coming together to deal with the accelerating world of change. But the film is also profoundly optimistic – never before have we had so many ideas and tools to help us cope with this change.

3: TO SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS, WE NEED MORE PROBLEM-SOLVERS
Who better to address this issue than Ashoka (where I work) founder Bill Drayton, the man who was among the first to set out the very concept of ‘social entrepreneur’? Drayton outlined to a packed room his view on what Ashoka considers the next big idea in moving the field–what he calls “Framework Change,” In Drayton’s view, to fix our broken systems, we need to accelerate the number of changemakers in the world, and ultimately get to a world in which everyone is a changemaker. That message really seemed to resonate at this year’s Forum.

4: IT STARTS WITH YOUNG PEOPLE
A significant number of discussions highlighted the vital role of young people. Bill Drayton estimates that about 700 of the 3,000 social entrepreneurs in the Ashoka network work directly with youth in some way ,and that helping young people develop the life skills to flourish in this new world is critical to solving the problems we’re facing. In particular, helping a child master ‘cognitive empathy’ was cited by Drayton and others as a foundation skill that could set up a child for life, and speakers such as Taddy Blecher of CIDA and Sandy Speicher of Ideo showed how such models are working in India, South Africa, Peru and around the world.

Check out the rest of the list at Fast Co Exist and let us know your thoughts, how will social entrepreneurship look five years from now? We shall see.