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UWA Business School
True social entrepreneurship requires co-operation between the public, private and community sectors, social entrepreneurship expert Dr Alex Nicholls told an audience at The University of Western Australia's Business School.

Speaking at a public lecture organised by the Business School's Centre for Social Impact on 12 April, Dr Nicholls, from the University of Oxford, said while social entrepreneurship remains a contested space, it has great potential to address ‘wicked problems' such as industrialisation and climate change, global security, health crises, population growth and inequality, all of which have no easy solutions.

The need to address social problems, argued Dr Nicholls, has arisen partly from the failure of markets to achieve desired outcomes in recent years - evidenced by the global financial crisis and growing levels of job insecurity and youth unemployment.

While these problems have created new challenges, they have also opened up new market opportunities for collaboration between different sectors. In particular, said Dr Nicholls, the bottom of the pyramid sectors - such as housing, health, education, microfinance, frugal innovation - represent largely untapped opportunities for entrepreneurs to engage the lowest socioeconomic groups.

Dr Nicholls emphasised the importance of the public sector in encouraging and implementing new market creation, welfare reform and taxation and regulatory changes. ‘Government can be proactive in the face of these changes and challenges,' he said, noting calls from UK Prime Minister David Cameron and United States President Barack Obama for a new kind of capitalism.

However, Dr Nicholls warned about placing too much emphasis on competing definitions of social entrepreneurship. ‘If we think about different types of organisations, they have different agendas which they are pushing forward for social entrepreneurship,' he said. ‘We need to be open and honest about what is going on... We shouldn't be getting hung up on solutions. We haven't found a way of describing it yet that we all agree on.'

According to Dr Nicholls, social entrepreneurship models should display four defining features: sociality - a primary focus on the creation of social value or public good; innovation - such as a focus on new markets, market failures, or new ideologies; market orientation - where the business addresses market opportunities and failures, has strong performance focus and stakeholder accountability; and hybridity - meaning that it bridges the public, private and community sectors.

Beyond defining itself, the social entrepreneurship field still faces significant challenges. These include measuring evidence of impact, going to scale - including growing the size and number of social entrepreneurs, and social investment - attracting investment in a sector where the market is fragmented and the risk-return metrics are problematic.

In Western Australia, two social entrepreneurship funds are already in existence. In London and Singapore, meanwhile, two separate social stock exchanges are set to open to the public in 2013. What does this mean for the future of social entrepreneurship?

‘I would argue we are just at that pre-institutionalised stage now,' said Dr Nicholls. ‘There's something there, there's real stuff happening but we need to hold it to account and trust it.'

Dr Nicholls was the first tenured lecturer in social entrepreneurship appointed at the University of Oxford. In 2004, he became the first staff member of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.

Dr Nicholls was in Perth as a guest of the Centre for Social Impact (UWA), which lies in the Business School, and Department for Communities.

Media references

Winthrop Professor Paul Flatau (UWA Business School) +618 6488 1366