Entrepreneurs care about more than profit
- Nov 18, 2010
Virgin Media Pioneers is all about helping young entrepreneurs ‘make their ideas happen’. It’s an online space where you can get help to develop your idea, pick up new skills and create your own network.
This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week (November 15th – 21st) and to celebrate Virgin Media Pioneers have asked experts from their community to write an article challenging some common myths associated with entrepreneurship. We’ll be dispelling a different myth each day of the week.
Today Graham Allcott from Think Productive argues that entrepreneurs care about so much more than just profit.
There was an old advertisement for Apple computers that said, “the very people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”.
Entrepreneurship has many definitions, and I’d like to challenge you to think about the relationship between entrepreneurship and profit. The truth is, entrepreneurship isn’t just about profit and there are plenty of examples of amazing entrepreneurship where profit was never even a motive or consideration.
A quick look on Google for definitions of the word “Entrepreneurship” throws up this, from Professor Greg Watson:
Entrepreneurship is more than simply starting a business.” The definition of entrepreneurship is a process through which individuals identify opportunities, allocate resources, and create value. This creation of value is often through the identification of unmet needs or through the identification of opportunities for change. Entrepreneurs see “problems” as “opportunities,” then take action to identify the solutions to those problems.
An example of this happened at Birmingham University, but it started when I visited an HIV/AIDS programme in Uganda. I suddenly realised there was an untapped resource, 4000 miles away that could really help mobilise community education around HIV/AIDS in Uganda – the students of Birmingham University.
Back in Birmingham, I advertised overseas volunteering opportunities by putting posters up all over the campus, and we had over a hundred students turn up for a talk, expecting to be given information about costs, dates, visas, flights, insurance and so on. But we hadn’t got any of that to show them. We hadn’t organised anything at all. But we knew that there would be enough people in that room with the willingness and skills to set it up and see it through, if we could just provide a little guidance, and importantly, inspire them it was possible for them to do it themselves.
Half the people in that room were pretty annoyed that there was no programme already in place for them to conveniently sign up to. They walked out. But the other half the people in that room worked together to set up that programme, inspired by the huge need we’d identified. They named it ‘Intervol’ and it’s still running 5 years later, having expanded to work in about a dozen countries each summer.
The students who set it up had no idea they had the capability to do this, but they found out they could because we created the chance for them to try. There are millions of unmet ‘needs’ in the world. And it’s comforting to know that a few posters, some calculated risk-taking and some brave, pioneering volunteers sat in a room are all it takes to start meeting some of those needs.
When people ask me what I do, I never quite know what label to say: I run my own business, running time management training and productivity workshops for blue chip companies, I consult with a range of charities, both paid and unpaid, I sit on the boards of three charities with turnovers ranging between £30,000 and £17 million and I’ve contributed to government policy (both red and blue).
When people ask me what I do, the answer I would LIKE to give them if only people knew what it meant would be to say “I’m a social entrepreneur”.
At the heart of everything I do is the desire to do great work, to make a difference and leave a little piece of the world in a slightly better place than I left it. I get a buzz spotting the opportunities to add value: sometimes that’s financial value, sometimes it’s social or community value. Sometimes I make money, sometimes I don’t worry about the money aspect at all.
Entrepreneurs are an interesting bunch of people and we’re all pretty different, with our own unique passions, foibles, hang-ups and insecurities (more than the average, actually!). Entrepreneurs love to see art where others see a blank canvas, or see the opportunity of a blank canvas where others see nothing but the ‘norms’ of the everyday. We challenge conventions, we create things from scratch, we mix it up. We sometimes break the rules but overall we like to test the assumptions of what’s possible.
We push things forward and actually the vast majority of us want to make the world a better place as we do it. Not so ‘crazy’ at all, when you think about it.
Graham Allcott is a social entrepreneur and an expert contributor for Virgin Media Pioneers.
Get involved in Global Entrepreneurship Week by asking We Are Scientists questions in celebration of GEW, as they take over Virgin Red Room on Twitter.
Photo by thinkpanama on Flickr.
Read a blog on the stereotypical entrepreneur
Read a blog shattering the myth that entrepreneurship is a solo activity
Read a blog challenging the myth that entrepreneurs are born not made
Read Richard Branson's thoughts on Global Entrepreneurship Week.
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