Social Entrepreneurship

Aplia's blog has a new post about social entrepreneurship. The idea, so far as there is one, seems to be that people are applying business lessons to nonprofit work.

Now, businesses have a lot to teach the nonprofit sector. For instance, businesses have gotten very good at logistics, which is a weak point in disaster response. Businesses are generally innovative in their use of technology, and nonprofits could benefit from that as well.

But charities have always learned from businesses (and vice versa). Nonprofits are often corporations, and they have boards and CEO's and performance reviews. Shipping companies like DHS send their managers to do stints at nonprofits, sharing their expertise and gaining experience. Charities can always be improved, but there's nothing new about the idea that business practices can be usefully applied to humanitarian problems. This is all to say that "social entrepreneurship" takes traditional philanthropy and adds what b-school students do best: buzzwords.