A friend of mine and I have a running debate about whether or not social enterprises are necessarily innovative. My friend is a business entrepreneur who moved on over to the social enterprise sector recently as an investor and incubator. I'm an academic in the field of development studies and am following developments in the field of social entrepreneurship.
My friend thinks social enterprises are necessarily innovative. He thinks that the old solutions in development have not worked and it's time to find new solutions.
On the other hand, I argue that some solutions may actually work but need to be scaled up or replicated. If someone has invented a viable model somewhere and I replicate that model somewhere else, then I think I can still consider myself a social entrepreneur even if the idea was not original. I'd argue that entrepreneurship is not necessarily about coming up with a new product or service but putting in the effort or taking the risk associated with offering a product or service.
The assumption, of course, is that the person who replicates has a unique selling proposition in order to be viable. In the example above, maybe the product or service is new relative to a locality that has not encountered the product or service before. Things become problematic when the product or service is offered to the same market and the market is saturated. Thing Zagu or shawarma.
Where my friend and I agree is that social enterprises necessarily address social problems (and both of us agree that this is done in a financially sustainable way) and maybe that's why I don't insist on the need for innovation. If I take a model and replicate it elsewhere, as long as I'm addressing a social problem, then I can call myself a social entrepreneur.
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