By Wayne Visser
Part 7 of 13 in Wayne Visser's Age of Responsibility Blog
Series for 3BL Media.
What do Taddy Blecher, Anurag Gupta, Wang Chuan-Fu and all
of the other social entrepreneurs have in common? Is this a special breed of
human being? Are social entrepreneurs born or can they be made? In the academic
literature, there is an interesting thread of research that is around the
concept of ‘champions’ in organisations, especially ‘environmental champions’.
The idea draws on prior conceptions of the human resources champion in the
1970s and 1980s, before HR became institutionalised.
Academics define environmental champions as people who can attractively
express a personal vision about environmental protection that is in tune with
both industry’s needs and wider public concern and who convince and enable
organisation members to turn environmental issues into successful corporate
programs and innovations. Environmental champions have been showed to imbue a
combination of characteristics, including being a catalyst, champion, sponsor,
facilitator and demonstrator. Their skills include the ability to identify,
package and sell environmental issues within their organisations. Their effectiveness in engaging others rests
heavily on expertise, top management support and a strong appreciation for the
problems that every business unit or operations manager faces.
Research on champions is not confined purely to the
environmental dimension of sustainability. Others have written about socially
responsible change-agents, as well as managers’ individual discretion as a
component of corporate social performance. British academic Christine
Hemingway, for example, finds that CSR can be the result of championing by a
few managers, based on their personal values and beliefs, despite the personal
and professional risks this may entail. Individual managers are also often
mediators in corporate philanthropy and stakeholder influence. Hence, the
notion of CSR champions has emerged as an important concept, which I will
return to this in the final blog on individual change agents.
Bill Drayton, who has been involved in selecting and
tracking the progress of the 2,700 Ashoka Fellows, believes social
entrepreneurs ‘focus everyday on the “how to” questions. How are they going to
get from here to their ultimate goal? How are they going to deal with this
opportunity or that barrier? How are the pieces going to fit together? They are
engineers, not poets. ... The entrepreneur’s job is not to take an idea and
then implement it. That is what franchisees do. The entrepreneur is building
something that is entirely new – by constantly creating and testing and
recreating and then testing and recreating again.’[i]
There are other characteristics as well, according to
Drayton. ‘The true social entrepreneur also has an almost magical ability to
move people, a power rooted in exceptional ethical fibre. He or she is always
asking people to do things that are unreasonable – and people do them. ... The
entrepreneur has an inner confidence that most sense but do not understand.
While others think entrepreneurs are taking risks, entrepreneurs don’t see it
that way because they have thought things through extremely well. They also
believe in their ability continuously to adapt the idea as they drive toward a
goal that they know is a huge win for everyone, and ultimately to reach that
goal. They know, in other words, that they have the gift that brings the
greatest happiness in the world, the gift of being able to give at the highest
level. Once one grasps who the true social entrepreneur is,’ concludes Drayton,
‘one would have to be crazed to bet against him or her ultimately changing the
world at large scale.’
The question remains: Is such social entrepreneurship a
random and unpredictable phenomenon, or is there some underlying rationale or
theory that we can use to better understand and advance sustainability
innovation? I did a research project with my colleagues at Cambridge University
to answer this question.[ii] In our attempt to
‘map the territory’, we created a model that looked at the Enablers, Processes
and Agents of sustainability innovation. There were a number of interesting
findings.
First, of the four Enablers of innovation that we identified
– government, finance, technology and culture – most people are focused either
on finance or technology. For example, in the SustainAbility survey of over 100
social entrepreneurs, 72% cited ‘access to finance’ as their primary challenge,
and much of the report is dedicated to understanding this issue.[iii] Furthermore, many
typical cases held up as innovation success stories – whether they be GE’s
EcoImagination programme or Vodafone’s M-Pesa service – are almost inevitably
technology solutions.
The corollary of this finding is that the role of government
and culture is being neglected. Government, by setting clear, long term policy
targets on social and environmental issues like biodiversity, climate change or
access to health and sanitation, can create an enabling environment that allows
business to innovate. Likewise, fostering a corporate and national culture of
innovation – of opportunity orientation rather than risk obsession – is a
necessary precondition for innovation.
In the area of Processes, of which we identified three –
individual actions, management systems and tailored approaches – most of the
focus has been on individual actions. This mirrored our findings for Agents,
where individuals were favoured over companies and non-business agents. Hence,
the notion of a sustainability champion or a social entrepreneur trains our
hopes on the creative, business-savvy individual. This overlooks the important
role of innovation within large companies – what the second in the SustainAbility
series of reports called ‘intrapreneurship’ – as well as the potential for NGOs
like Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) to be part of the
innovative solution.
Another interesting finding from my Cambridge research was
that most cited cases seem to be innovation processes specifically targeting
sustainability issues, rather than efforts at embedding sustainability
principles in core innovation processes. This is a fundamental distinction,
because it means that most R&D going on in companies – and hence most
innovation – is not systematically building in social and environmental
criteria. As a result, much like CSR more generally, innovation is a
peripheral, project/product specific activity, which is exactly what is
preventing scalable solutions from emerging in the mainstream economy. Until
CSR is built into every organisational process – and especially into strategic
functions like R&D or new product development – we will always be playing
on the fringes of the Age of Responsibility.
Article reference
Visser, W. (2012) Nature vs. Nurture: Are Social
Entrepreneurs Born or Made, Wayne Visser Blog Briefing, 20 March 2012.
Source
Extracted and adapted from Visser, W. (2011) The Age of
Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. London: Wiley.
[i]
Drayton, B. (2010). Tipping the world: The power of collaborative
entrepreneurship. Published on the McKinsey What Matters site, 8 April 2010.
[ii]
Blowfield, M., Visser, W. & Livesey, F. (2007). Sustainability Innovation:
Mapping the Territory, University Cambridge Programme for Industry Research
Paper Series: No. 2.
[iii]
Growing Opportunity: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems (2007)
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