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Social entrepreneurship as a concept is not
new, but the term has gained prominence
only during the past decade. The credit
for introducing the term is often given to William Drayton, a MacArthur Fellow. In 1980,
William Drayton founded an organization by the
name Ashoka which is one of the first ventures conceived explicitly for funding
social entrepreneurs. This venture was started as Drayton believed that social entrepreneurs
had great potential for dealing with the social
problems of society. The very choice of the name Ashoka
for the organization reflects that the term may be
new but the concept of social entrepreneurship is
not. Ashoka, the great Mauryan ruler, in his time did
a lot for the society. His initiatives were not restricted to the development and welfare
of people, but even went beyond to the extent of opening hospitals for animals.
Since the time when the term was made popular in the 1980s, many social
enterprises gained prominence with varying objectives
and approaches to deal with societal problems. Because of the differences in the operations
and objectives of these social enterprises, the way
in which social entrepreneurship gets defined and discussed also tends to vary. Since the term is
still in its nascent stage, multiple definitions of
social entrepreneurship exist both in
research-based academics and non-research-based
popular literature. Despite the differences in the use of
the term, there are two common conceptions that
can readily be identified in the literature. These conceptions are not discrete by themselves
and tend to overlap to a large extent.
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