The interlock between government, business and non-profit: social entrepreneurs

Just been through the 2011 list of winners of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. It's a good measure of the social challenges the world copes with, or rather: the geographical differences of these challenges, since the winners have quite some different activities dependent on their location. For instance, 2 out of the 4 European winners are building businesses around helping out poorer or less educated people to find a job. This obviously is a reflection of a tough structural unemployment problem in most of the European countries.

Doing some further research on social entrepreneurship, this chart (found on the blog http://venturepragmatist.com/tag/social-entrepreneurship/ ) made me think for a while. In a previous blog post I shared the reasons for businesses to move into social entrepreneurship, but the one beneath has the merit of bringing the Public Sector into the equation, and to map the interests and relations between the 3 parties.

All these interlocks point to important trends: private companies will increasingly perform public tasks (pushing the drive to Market States), governments will be under pressure to be more (cost-) efficient and 'shared value' will become a crucial core value for business. Interestingly, the author puts social entrepreneurship in the middle of all these influences...