Introduction
The significance of this report is to analyze the entrepreneurial traits and characteristics and the extent to which they demonstrate them in their business venture, especially for a social enterprise venture. The report also focuses on the challenges or the major boundaries that act as hindrances in running a social enterprise.
An entrepreneur is an individual with the capability of recognizing market opportunities, pool them together and share resources among them to distinguish (Schumpeter, 2008).
Social entrepreneurship is the process of solving social problems using creative an innovative approaches. Social entrepreneurs assume an operation to make and sustain social values. They usually follow opportunities to assist this operation. Social entrepreneurs provide a reasonable and moral idea that give support to increase the number of people who raise, embrace the idea and implement it.
Social entrepreneurship can further be described by three components which are:
- A difficulty or a problem.
- Social change.
- A Maintainable solution.
Social entrepreneurship faces challenges which include adopting of technologies, getting skilled employees, getting government approvals, getting funding, balancing between business and social mission as well as poor performance measurement.
Social entrepreneurial traits demonstrated by Prince Sam
Risk Taking
Starting of a new business always pose a risk for entrepreneurs. They can either succeed or fail. To be on safe side, entrepreneurs avoid ventures in which probabilities against of failure are high.
Prince started the Zambrero chain restaurant while in medical school and at his early ages. He risked $ 10,000 in the year 2005 at Canberra to open up his first restaurant. This idea had got him while working as a chef to put him through the medical school and saw a local market for fresh, healthy, gourmet Mexican food. This shows that an entrepreneur ventures into an enterprise manages and has the responsibility for the outcome. (Hodgetts, 2011).
Self confidence
Self-confidence is having strong thoughts and clearly- defined goals of what to achieve. An entrepreneur has a high level of self- confidence when getting down to a venture (Stacia, 2016).
Even under pressurized conditions, the entrepreneurs can get the job done as a result of their high level of confidence. This helps them distinguish an opportunity where others see a challenge. When most people focus on the challenge, an entrepreneur focuses on the result.
Prince Sam demonstrates a lot of self- confidence when he plans to add the number of Zambrero outlets by 30. Through his Emagie Foundation, he built 15 schools in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Queensland and still plans to add 100 more in Asia- Pacific region by 2014.
Hardworking
This is putting of psychological and physical efforts to get things done. Entrepreneurs work for long and abnormal hours since they believe to be their treasured benefit. This creates a challenge to the entrepreneur to balance between the venture needs and other life commitments (Wickham, 2013).
In 2012, Prince was named as the 2012 Young Australian of the Year for his exemplary achievements in eradicating scabies which was a disease highly affecting indigenous communities. Prince is described to do the work of 100 men, and for a decade, he has been for only four hours a night.
Creativity and innovation
Creativity is generating ideas, alternatives, and possibilities useful in solving problems. It is the ability to bring up an idea and identify new ways of solving a problem. It assists in combining known components which are wrongly assumed to be unconnected to gather new ideas (Singh, 2014).
Innovation is the implementation of these new ideas. Innovation is a process of intentional change made to create value by meeting opportunity and seeking advantage (Thomas, 2015).
Prince Sam applies innovation and creativity in his medical, business and aid projects. Such creative and innovative actions include the setting up of the stem cell company and an alternative energy company while on his six- month sabbatical from practicing medicine but to him is not a schoolboy break.
Challenges faced in running a social enterprise.
Funding
Most social venture investors choose to fund the social enterprise after a finance proven solutions especially for proved organizations run by rich people. This causes little funding accessible to benefit individuals with passionate social enterprise venture to develop their ideas into maintainable solutions. It is the strong availability of capital financing is required to establish new social enterprises and speed up their growth to maturity.
If investors can get a clear picture of impact by social enterprise ventures, this can bring about a provision of innovative financing to these social enterprise ventures and charities.
There are cultural barriers which social entrepreneurs overcome before they can work in the same way private sector entrepreneurs do (Austin, Stevenson, and Wei- Skillern, 2008). This cultural barrier affects their self- confidence, their innovativeness and creativity as well as their high degree of risk taking.
Poor Performance measurement.
Social investors are today struggling to choose the suitable social enterprise to fund. This is due to difficulties in evaluating and reporting on the performance of such social enterprise. This has been a long time problem in charity sector where New Philanthropic Capital is an innovative participant trying to make social investors understand which charitable organization to fund to achieve desired outcome (Pravin, 2013).
Balancing business with social mission
Balancing business certainties and social mission is challenging as most of the social enterprises receive funding from donors and other social investors in their early stages of development (Pravin, 2013). The social enterprise mangers should be comfortable in adopting the activities in the venture and cope with the changes in duties as required of them. When business activities are not in line with the organizational operations, social investors may question in the manner the funds granted are being used.
Conclusion.
From the discussion above, several conclusions are drawn as follows. Simplification of performance measurement of social investment should be enhanced to be able to determine the return on capital invested. Unbundling of social enterprise sector to create clarity on using measures to give confidence to an investor. This will avoid measurement by the impact of organizational activities to the society. Social enterprise to be funded should also be in a position to deliver commercial returns on capital.
It is important that the business activities accepted not to separate those funding agencies such as the government agencies, donors or other potential social investors with the social enterprise managers.
References
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