Purpose is a soft virtue, but it is what gives you steal in your
spine. Starting a business is difficult but starting a business where you think that “doing”good and “being” green, is the route to growing prosperity and well-being for yourself and others is, the equivalent to not taking performance enhancing “steroids” in body-building. The phrase, “it’s not natural” takes on a chameleon characteristic of standing out, while trying to fit in.
It for this reason business categories gets a very current twist of adding the word social as in social enterprise to a thing, enterprise, that is basically social by nature if you have ever tried to sell anything and really solve anything.
Pointless to some degree like talking about social marketing as differentiated from marketing. These descriptions seem so 20th century in a startling new 21st century world.
The UN’s new Gloabal Goals have given us a direction that many can now follow to solve problems in a meaningful way of both wide and direct social change through consumer behaviour shaped by a market force that is skewed intentionally towards doing good for people and the planet.
This is not as crazy as it seems as solving peoples problems has always been rewarding but the very market failures that have led in some cases to these outcomes are the extra challenge of the social entrepreneur. Unclear property rights and externalities around pollution and waste not properly calibrated to ensure their demise or even evaluation in the costs.
There are further time challenges to boot. Many don’t mind paying for a service that gives pretty immediate benefits but paying now for some thing that only accrue in distant futures is antithetical to a market of immediate gratification.
We live in a me now society needing a me now solution. If only they exist, but obstacles breed innovation. That’s what we need now more than a simple sustainable solution. We need innovative sustainable solutions.
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/50011944@N00/3094292435″>RedRiver_20081025_0325</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>