Social Enterprise Failure Report

Social entrepreneurship is all the buzz lately. It seems everywhere you look socially minded entrepreneurs are pursuing businesses to fulfill social needs in their communities. While their goals and efforts are certainly worthwhile – and deserving of much praise – the reality is not always so kind. Behind all the hype and hoopla lie many challenges, with a number of initiatives falling flat, in need of tweaking and reconfiguring, while others fail completely.

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Unfortunately we don’t talk much about failures in this sector. This lack of chatter is not only impacting our ability to establish a realistic picture of social enterprise, it’s inevitably fostering more failure/challenges, since so much of entrepreneurial success hinges on learning from others.

SEE Change Magazine wanted to change that. We wanted to research the underpinnings of challenges and failures and offer some important lessons learned, with the hope that these shared learnings will help embolden our community and prove that discourse can only be positive.

Toward that end, we commissioned a report by three impressive MBA students at the Rotman School of Management, as part of a course given by Vince Brewerton. We hope the insight provided offers your organization a few ideas from which to learn, grow, and succeed.

Enjoy,

SEE Change Magazine

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