My goal of my blog posts for the India China Institute’s website is to give some insight into the organizations that I came across during my research in Hong Kong. I was fortunate enough meet with some very generous people who are doing really great work to promote social entrepreneurship in Hong Kong.
To give some background, my research was focused on examine social entrepreneurship in Hong Kong. After I explain this, the first question asked is usually “What is social entrepreneurship?” There are a million answers out there, but I usually just bring the conversation back to the general idea of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs see an opportunity to create value. Think of Pierre Omidyar wishing for an online marketplace and then starting eBay. Bill Bowerman wasn’t happy with the shoes that Steve Prefontaine was wearing at the University of Oregon, so he made his own by melting rubber on a waffle iron – ultimately leading to Nike.
Now if you apply this same attitude toward social deficiencies that these people saw in market deficiencies, you get social entrepreneurship. Wendy Kopp saw an opportunity to make a platform for young people to contribute to society and founded Teach For America. Another great example is John Muir, whose advocacy for conservation eventually turned into the National Park system (which Ken Burns dubbed “America’s Greatest Idea”). Social entrepreneurs are individuals whose innovative ideas and practices are seen through to address pressing social issues like Kopp and Muir did in addressing education and conservation, respectively. This was also exhibited when Mohammed Yunus looked to address chornic poverty by providing a mechanism to give the poor access to credit. Social entrepreneurs exist all over the world and offer a variety of products and services. Social entrepreneurship is the platform in which they are enabled.
The approach I took in my research was modeled after a project I worked on during the spring semester of 2011, when a group of graduate students and I worked in a project for Synergos’ Arab World Social Innovators Program. Our efforts focused on building a map of the ecosystem of social entrepreneurship in Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt. I was assigned to focus on Jordan, and I spent several weeks making phone calls with social entrepreneurs, and various intermediaries that enable social entrepreneurs to create change.
It was the intermediaries that became of most interest to me. Like it was described above, social entrepreneurs take all shapes and sizes. The definition who is and is not a social entrepreneur is admittedly porous, but the intermediaries that offer critical consulting, financial, and support services to social entrepreneurs are much easier to identify and will most likely outlive the ventures they support (not all entrepreneurial efforts succeed, right?).
In Hong Kong, I was eager to apply my experience of mapping of the ecosystem of intermediaries as I did for the Synergos project to my experience as an intern at Echoing Green, a leading social entrepreneurship intermediary based in New York. At Echoing Green I had more of a behind-the-scenes look at the types of support that social entrepreneurs need and the ways in which social entrepreneurs utilize the services offered by intermediaries.
My goal was to find the intermediaries in Hong Kong that offered support to social entrepreneurs and find out what kind of support they offered, and how the field at large was evolving.