Silicon Valley’s stereotypical approach to solving public problems is to invest in social entrepreneurship. Bypass lumbering government bureaucracy to find innovative solutions that harness economic incentives to create social value. In place of government-run schools, find corporations to fund charter schools. Instead of foreign aid, fund Kiva, a platform that allows individuals with capital, however small, to lend directly to development entrepreneurs who need it.
The tech titan perhaps most identified with the concept and practice of social enterprise is Jeff Skoll, first president of eBay, whose eponymous foundation has invested directly in social entrepreneurs around the world, as well as establishing the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School, Oxford university, and the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.
The growing class of social entrepreneurs that Skoll and others fund stands between the private and public sectors, applying new tools and approaches to the work government has traditionally done. But in a new book, Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works, Skoll Foundation chief executive Sally Osberg and Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, present a model of social enterprise that directly engages government in a number of critical ways.