Our collective imagination of the European Middle Ages conjures an age of darkness, disease, war, feudalism and feuding. The true story is much more complicated. Indeed, the Medieval era was a necessary period of challenge and experimentation – a period in which political systems evolved and in which understanding of the natural world struggled move from mysticism to science. It was an era that, although challenging, prepared the Western World for Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment.
The world of social entrepreneurship is, in many ways, in its own Middle Ages.
Throughout the first decade of the 2000s, driven by buzz from books like David Bornstein’s “How to Change the World” and fueled by internet fortunes from people like Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar, social entrepreneurship – the field at the intersection of social change and business – leapt into the public eye in a major way.
Magazines and blogs started telling the stories of Teach for America and KaBoom. Fellowships like Echoing Green and Draper Richards began gaining prominence for their work funding the next generation of social enterprise startups. Corporations started to significantly reengage with social responsibility and green initiatives. Conferences like the Skoll Forum and Social Capital Markets created a crossroads for actors from across the spectrum to meet.
Since then, many amazing things have been accomplished and the field has evolved greatly. Yet at the same time, excitement about new business models can only last so long. The public has a short attention span, and the stories of promise must ultimately give way to stories of success for the field to live up to its true, transformational potential. The reality is, of course, that the real work of social entrepreneurship is not (just) lighting the fires of excitement and passion of bloggers, students, and investors, but demonstrating with real work and real success that a different, more sustainable approach to business and the business of social good is possible.
Three of the presentations at the TED Fellows conference this morning – held in concert with the annual TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland – were reminders of the long road ahead.
Sonaar Luthra is the designer of a product called the Water Canary. The name and idea were inspired by the simplicity of the system miners used for decades to determine if poisonous gases were reaching dangerous levels – brining a canary will them that would succumb first in the case of danger. The Water Canary is a simple, low-cost, no-training-required device that determines water quality in potentially contaminated areas, and then uploads information to a global grid to get the macro picture of contamination.
Manuel Aguilar’s QUETSOL is a low cost solar system aimed (currently) at Guatemalan families living on around $300/month. The kit includes a solar panel, three lights, and a phone charger. A new options will soon be available that makes it able to charge laptop computers as well.
Femi Akinde is challenging the problem of local commerce and market knowledge in Africa with his SlimTrader. SlimTrader allows consumers to use their mobile phones to check inventory of stores that would otherwise take hours to get to, and even make purchases via SMS.
These are all incredibly promising companies working on life-changing challenges with promising early results. So how do they affirm the idea that social entrepreneurship is in a “middle ages?” Each one of these companies represents one in a long line of attempts to solve same problems, and each follows a trail of companies that have tried and failed to make a similar model work at scale. Each of them is, in other words, extremely easy to write about but extremely hard to make work in the real world.
The point, however, is not to cast these companies a cynical eye, but to reevaluate the infrastructure we need to enable them to succeed. If we are truly in for a period of arduous experimentation and often thankless trial and error, we need to make sure that support for these companies is not tied to a hype cycle, but is significant, sustained and driven by real milestones to let them blossom. Programs like TED Fellows are essential because their commitment is not event attendance, but rather a community of support that will can sustain and enliven these entrepreneurs through bad times as well as good. These social innovators are working towards nothing less than Revolution and Enlightenment, and the question is whether the funders, supporters and advocates who became so excited about the field over the last few years are prepared for just how long the transformation they seek might take.
Check back on Inc. Technology for more updates from TEDGlobal.
