Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition By Roger L. Martin & Sally Osbe

This article starts out by listing a number of entrepreneurs and explaining how they succeeded by managing to redefine a suboptimal equilibrium and replace it with a new better way of doing things. What is the difference between this and a "Social Entrepreneur" is the question I'm left asking myself. Did these people not make countless lives better in someway. Ebay makes peoples lives better, the PC makes peoples lives better, Fedex....etc. People readily adopted these new systems because they were better than the old ones - is that not a service to society? Netflix saves huge amounts of fuel simply because people no longer make a round trip to the movie rental place every time they want to see a movie, instead the postal service delivers Netflix on a trip that would already be made. This article answers this question with the concept of defining social entrepreneurship as placing the social good as the starting element and working toward a sustainable profitability within a frame work of creating a new better equilibrium. This is a much more exact and useful definition that has much more currency than any other I've seen so far.