The Wharton team of Ashish Mehta, Xiao Chen, Xiaoying (Alice) Zhang, Hui (Vicki) Yan, and Xiaoming (Vivien) Zuo recently won the National Sustainable Venture Capital Competition.  A big congratulations is in order as the team bested competitors from UC-Berkeley, Columbia, University of Michigan, NYU, UNC, Duke, and Northwestern to take the title.  It is a testament to Wharton’s emerging strength in developing students with a keen sense for identifying business opportunities that combine financial and social return.  According to the official conference press release:

“The SVCIC is the only MBA competition in which students evaluate business plans that incorporate financial profitability, environmental integrity and social equity from entrepreneurs actively seeking venture capital funding.”

Some of us may dream of a day when this is not a specialized competition, but rather simply the way that all businesses are evaluated, but in the meantime, we’re quite happy to be at the forefront of an emerging field!

David Brooks presents a spot-on description of the modern social entrepreneur in “Thouroughly Modern Do-Gooders”, painting an accurate picture of the backgrounds, methodologies, and drive behind today’s new breed of social activist…

“The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of résumé bling. Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business to help the less fortunate.

Earlier generations of benefactors thought that social service should be like sainthood or socialism. But this one thinks it should be like venture capital…

The venture-capital ethos means instead that these social entrepreneurs are almost willfully blind to ideological issues. They will tell you, even before you have a chance to ask, that they are data-driven and accountability-oriented. They’re always showing you multivariate regressions or explaining why some promising idea “didn’t pencil out.”

In classic Brook’s Bobos in Paradise fashion, he also calls out a more restrained sense of external identification amongst this new generation of social entrepreneurs…

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

Brooks portrait is in many ways inspiring and the power of bringing market oriented solutions to global problems is undeniable, yet I do wonder if we will be doing so by sacrificing passion.  When he depicts the generation as “willfully blind to ideological issues” he does so as a compliment to our practicality, but by trading the irrational and helpful commitment that comes only from ideological drive do we risk burning out when our quantitatively and economically derived solutions do not pan out fast enough?  I certainly do not have the answer, but I believe it is important question for us to ask ourselves. 

While most people at Wharton would associate Grow To Be Great with the business textbook arguing against corporate downsizing, those of us in the world of social entrepreneurship think of growing to be great to be the challenge of the developing world.  William Easterly, professor of Economics at New York University, has a wonderful recent article in the Los Angeles Timescommenting on these growth challenges in the face of the Western “aid machine” that fuels itself off perpetuating the perception that Africa is a starving, war torn, and backward place.  Easterly’s commentary is powerful and supportive of a view that resourceful, social entrepreneurship and not a continuous stream of handouts is the key to growth.

“The real Africa needs increased trade from the West more than it needs more aid handouts. A respected Ugandan journalist, Andrew Mwenda, made this point at a recent African conference despite the fact that the world’s most famous celebrity activist — Bono — was attempting to shout him down. Mwenda was suffering from too much reality for Bono’s taste: “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” asked Mwenda.”

Nicholas Kristof has an inspiring column on the rise of social entrepreneurship in this past weekend’s New York times. He cites, among others, current Harvard Business School student Andrew Klaber, founder of Orphans Against Aids, as an example of a generational shift towards applying entrepreneurial solutions to global problems…

“Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.”