A Social Entrepenurship seminar by Daniel Zapata (17 March 2021)

Attended by 1,000 participants, a seminar brought by Professor Daniel Zapata was an interested one to cover. He elaborated on the emerge of social entrepreneurship in this era where it is important to understand the gap in a society and to deliver products and services after to create the social value to enhance sustainability. In the beginning, he started with a clear definition of social entrepreneurship as a process of creating value by combining new ways to create social value. As different from the commercial ones, social entrepreneurship does not take profitability as its core mission but to achieve the “triple-bottom-line” which also consists of social impact and sustainability. Social entrepreneurship has taken the holistic approach to their business model as they are mission-driven to create and sustain social value and discovering opportunities to exploit in society. The terms “Discovery” and “Exploitation” become the basic building of social entrepreneurship as he explained.

During the seminar, Professor Daniel Zapata also delivered differences between commercial and social entrepreneurship. He identified that commercial entrepreneurship tends to be a wealth-creation focus where profit determined the success of the business, subject to the market. However, social entrepreneurship tends to be a social mission focus where sustainability, social impact, and profit are their success determinants. Ways to innovate between both also provide differences where commercial entrepreneurs more likely to provide break-throughs and new needs and shift resources to more economically productive users, where social entrepreneurs provide collective innovation and basic long-standing needs more effectively. As it provides many differences, he claimed that more companies now applying a hybrid organization to combine both commercial and social entrepreneurship just like what Tesla did in innovating electronic cars for a sustainable environment.

The emerge of social entrepreneurs usually came from empathy as a cognitive and emotional antecedent in the model. Especially during this pandemic era, as a lot of people suffering from economic crises, the social entrepreneur plays a part to overcome this situation, such as Lieferando that delivers food using electric bikes in Germany. After empathy takes place, trustworthiness is the key to validate social entrepreneurship in society, consisting of reputation, transparency, and credibility. One example taken is Fairphone where they highly put on transparency, showing their cost distribution and how they only take 1% profit from each unit sold. Lastly, to bring the success of social entrepreneurship further, networks are one way to gain social support. From venture capital, suppliers, facilities, clients, communities, these are what social businesses need to help in the growth as they do not innovate alone. The need to also have communities of practice also important to gain more advanced social knowledge.

At the end of the seminar, he conveyed how social entrepreneurship is important for long-term sustainability and how to reach the idea of identifying the gap. As he showed a picture of a bear standing in the middle of a road in some forest, social entrepreneurs would not think that simply. They will think of how can people built a road that polluting bear habitat and provide a solution to protect the bear habitat. In such a way, social entrepreneurship can be a way to see social problems as opportunities to build a systemic improvement for sustainable impact. As it emerged in the society, social entrepreneurship also sometimes taken to compensate institution that is inefficient, ineffective, and unresponsive to be able to re-gain the positive reputation from customers. Therefore, through this social entrepreneurship seminar, Professor Daniel Zapata encourages the audience, especially the youth, to also take action in being a social entrepreneurship as a way to build sustainable living culturally, socially, and economically in the future. (Created by: Amanda Puteri Rozyanti)