Social entrepreneurship – new buzz word?

By marielk in Higher Education News. Social entrepreneurship is rapidly becoming a new buzz word on higher education. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) recently announced a new initiative focused on social entrepreneurship that will have a budget of £2 million, following up on earlier activities in the area. In cooperation with the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs (UnLtd) 56 highe education institutions have been selected to lift the social entrepreneurship initiatives in these institutions.
While social engagement has been recognised as an important part of the third mission of universities, the focus on particularly social entrepeneurship now appears to have become an important mode for such activities. Last week on the Hedda blog we covered the various massive open online courses available, and the most popular one at the moment – Coursera – is structured as social entrepeneurship initiative.
So what does this mean? In very basic terms, social entrepreneurship means that in a context of entrepreneurship, focus and measure of success is through achieving social change (often meaning a solution to particular social problem) rather than maximizing pure private profits. While often presented as a fundamentally different, Austin, Stevenson and Vei-Skillern argued that the difference between commercial and social entrepeneurship are not necessarily dichotomous, but they rather form a continuum where an initiative can be more or less focused by societal or commercial goals. They further note that social entrepreneurship initiatives tend to be conceptualized by their goal, rather than organisational forms, which can be varied.Historically, Mair and Marti traced some notable exceptions back to 1960s:  Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild founded in 1968 by Bill Strictland, Grameen bank founded in 1976 to combat poverty in Bangladesh (the founder Muhammed Yunus received the Nobel peace prize in 2006), as well as Ashoka founded in 1980 that provided seed funding for new entrepeneurs. Nevertheless, it is also pointed out that in the research literature social entrepreneurship is still a relatively fuzzy concept with no clear understanding of what counts as social entrepreneurship.
The fuzzyiness of the concept in research literature is in accord with the variety of different activities that received support in the HEFCE initiative: from awareness activities to specific courses that would teach social entrepreneurship. It appears that there is also a clear focus on achieving a greater relevance of universities in their regions. HEFCE website quotes David Sweeney who is  the director of Research, Knowledge Exchange and Skills, and he argued that: “This unique initiative builds upon HEFCE’s partnership with UnLtd and will help university staff and students use their talent and enthusiasm to make a difference in the wider community.”
In many ways the launch of the initiative echoes well with the debates on the relevance of universities in contemporary society. Political and administrative spheres are increasingly entering into the inner life of universities through for example standardization processes and increased accountability measures, creating an ever more unstable environment and questions about the role of universities in solving important societal problems.
In this context, a greater focus on social entrepreneurship can increase the opportunities for universities to contribute directly into achieving social change with the available expertise and knowledge, and not least – make this contribution clearly visible. However, this also means that more focus in higher education studies could be put into understanding the dynamics of social entrepreneurship in higher education.