Recently I met some "do gooders" who advocate for "social entrepreneurship" to solve social problems. In their minds the term looks like this.
Social
entrepreneurship
They believe that social entrepreneurship is the solution to the lack of morality in capitalism. I prefer to think about the shortcomings of capitalism, whatever they might be, as an education problem. If we train the next generation of capitalists and business owners to be more socially concerned in their business decisionmaking, the supposed shortcomings of capitalism may not be so onerous. If we merely taught a framework wherein the bottom of the pyramid was just considered a high growth market where returns needed to match risks, many social problems would be quickly addressed by those capitalist "dogs". Such a framework would probably mobilize a much larger group of problem solvers than the small current group of social entrepreneurs and the new entrants would bring their own capital and access to capital markets.
Just one more observation. In the 1960s the best business school graduates went into manufacturing and the economic growth in the U.S. was spectacular. In the 1980s the best business school graduates went into banking, investment banking and hedge funds and they nearly wrecked the world financial system in 2008. The good news is that the best B school grads today are starting new technology companies, which hopefully means that the dummies will become the bankers as it was in the prosperous period starting in 1960. Many B school grads are interested in social entrepreneurship, which is a great temporary soloution until we educate enough people to realize that capitalism and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive.