S o c i a l E n t r e p r e n e u r s
a r e C r i t i c a l
But what can be said of the unforgiving logic of scale? Given the
magnitude of 21st-century challenges—bringing an end to largescale poverty, dealing with global climate change, and coping with
emergent global threats to public health—what role can entrepreneurs of any type play in realistic strategies? The skeptic may still
maintain that a handful of small enterprises and nongovernmental organizations, however well intentioned, will never make more
than a dent in such immense problems. Whatever solutions exist
will have at their center national governments, international organizations, and multinational corporations.
Such a view has the veneer of realism, without the substance. If anything is more naive than an unquestioning belief in the transformative
power of social entrepreneurs, it is an unquestioning belief in the transformative power of national governments, international organizations,
and multinational corporations. As already indicated, in many parts
of the world where change is most urgently needed, governments are
as likely to be part of the problem as part of the solution. In such environments, all institutions structured to work through national governments face serious handicaps. The 21st-century relevance of the United
Nations and the World Bank—the two institutions most clearly tasked
in the post-World War II order with addressing global challenges—is
no more assured than that of social entrepreneurs.
Indeed, a somewhat paradoxical characteristic of our age is that
even as technological and organizational changes occur on evercompressing timescales, they increasingly lie beyond the direct
control or infl uence of any single organization or coalition of organizations. Many institutions that not long ago had the power to be
globally dominant through scale, scope, and closed system development are now seeking to reinvent themselves by participating in
global networks built on shared, often open, standards.
Such global trends provide the fi nal piece to the puzzle of entrepreneurship and social value. In a highly networked world, smallscale actors have the capability to achieve large-scale impacts in
ways achievable in the past only through raw institutional growth.
As Elkington and Hartigan write in their aforementioned book,