Very few living people have looked into the face of Hell as closely as Larry Brilliant—yet he remains weirdly optimistic that we can overcome the world's great challenges in areas like climate change, poverty and the risk of pandemics. Helping wrap up this year's Skoll World Forum at Oxford's Saïd Business School, Brilliant (now executive director of Google.org) noted that as a doctor in India he had held several hundred children as they died of smallpox and other diseases. He took his audience both to the highs and the lows of the emerging societal agenda for business. Although his presentation began with a mind-boggling aerial tour of Bangladesh, showing how much of it will disappear under water as denuded mountains shed rainwater faster and melting ice-caps push up sea levels, he then turned to the eradication of smallpox—a process he helped direct—as a shining example of what humanity can achieve if it gets its act together.
You could almost hear the 700-strong audience crash its gears as people tried to shift from bleak pessimism to nervous optimism. But they were pretty nimble, many of them leading social and environmental entrepreneurs from around the world. People who typically, as Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation put in the immortal words of that consummate social entrepreneur Michael Young, "take 'no' as a question."
Brilliant is a tough act to follow, but that was my challenge. I chaired the next session, a discussion between the man who first coined the term "social entrepreneur"—Bill Drayton of Ashoka—and Ed Miliband, UK Minister for the third sector, charged with building a social enterprise sector already estimated to include 55,000 enterprises. But I had a secret weapon up my sleeve, our new report on the potential social of entrepreneurship, Growing Opportunity—Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems. Prepared with the support of the Skoll Foundation, Allianz and DuPont, it draws on a quantitative survey of over 100 leading social and environmental entrepreneurs.
True, the results show that today's social entrepreneurs face a growing array of challenges, with access to capital cited by 72 per cent of respondents as their main problem. The promotion and marketing of their organisations and programmes came second (41 per cent), while the third issue involved attracting, retaining and developing talented professionals who are both passionate about the mission and comfortable with entrepreneurship. But these people have what it takes. Where they don't, the social entrepreneurs surveyed—unlike many NGOs—are overwhelmingly interested in working with business to fill in the gaps.
Still, there are a number of mental barriers that need to be broken down before we see any more partnerships of the sort that Bangladesh's Grameen Bank has just formed with France's Danone, to supply fortified yoghurt products to the poor. Fortuitously, the weekend before the Skoll World Forum opened its doors I had spent a day with Tim Smit, co-founder and chief executive of the Eden Project, which he estimates has cost £130m to build and has already put £800m back into the Cornish economy. Smit's argument is that companies like BP, Shell, Unilever—and, yes, whisper it soft—even ExxonMobil could become the great social enterprises of tomorrow.
The challenge is to work out how to take the best social enterprise models and apply them to the running of big businesses and public services. The mistake made by many critics, Smit believes, is that they demonise such organisations rather than thinking through how they might be transformed. While public interest unsurprisingly focuses on the $10m-plus the Skoll Foundation hands out each year to support entrepreneurs, we should be trying to work out how to apply the entrepreneurial thinking of people like Jeff Skoll (who wrote eBay's original business plan) and Tim Smit to the challenges so brilliantly spotlighted by the man who helped rid the world of smallpox, a scourge that killed 500 million people in the last century alone.
John Elkington is Founder and Chief Entrepreneur at SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com) and blogs at www.johnelkington.com
