Ashoka, a prominent global non-profit focusing on social entrepreneurship, identifies some archetypal social entrepreneurs:

Susan B. Anthony fought for Women’s Rights in the United States, including the right to control property and helped spearhead adoption of the 19th amendment. Vinoba Bhave (pictured, left) was founder and leader of the Land Gift Movement, he caused the redistribution of more than 7,000,000 acres of land to aid India’s untouchables and landless. Dr. Maria Montessori developed the Montessori approach to early childhood education. Florence Nightingale was founder of modern nursing, she established the first school for nurses and fought to improve hospital conditions. Margaret Sanger was founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she led the movement for family planning efforts around the world. John Muir was a naturalist and conservationist, he established the National Park System and helped found The Sierra Club.

Ashoka says social entrepreneurs are about “creating solutions to change society for the better. While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale.” The vitally important work of people such as Vinoba Bhave, John Muir or Florence Nightingale was both social and entrepreneurial, true. But cannot traditional entrepreneurs also contribute mightily to addressing social problems? Writes Carl Schramm in the Stanford Social Innovation Review:

Over the past decade or so, the term social entrepreneur has become a fashionable way of describing individuals and organizations that, in their attempts at large-scale change, blur the traditional boundaries between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Given the ceaseless appearance of innovations and new institutional forms, we should welcome a new term that allows us to think systematically about a still-emergent field.

One danger, however, is that the use of the modifier social will diminish the contributions of regular entrepreneurs—that is, people who create new companies and then grow them to scale. In the course of doing business as usual, these regular entrepreneurs create thousands of jobs, improve the quality of goods and services available to consumers, and ultimately raise standards of living. Indeed, the intertwined histories of business and health in the United States suggests that all entrepreneurship is social entrepreneurship. The pantheon of model social entrepreneurs should thus include names such as railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, meatpacking magnate Gustavus Swift, and software tycoon Bill Gates.

This broader definition of social entrepreneurship is especially salient at a time when the United States is suffering through a full-blown recession and high unemployment, with attendant stress and hardship for many families and individuals. Understanding that all entrepreneurship is social accents the need for governments to foster economic development and for all parents to insist on access to quality education for their children.

Hat tip: Ben Casnocha.