J. Gregory Dees
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Social Entrepreneurship: Opportunities to Use
Business Skills for Social Purposes
According to economist Joseph Shumpeter “the
function of entrepreneurs is to reform or
revolutionize the patterns of production.” We are in
an era in which many people believe that we need to
reform or revolutionize the patterns of solving
social problems, such as poverty and pollution, as
well as the patterns of providing socially important
goods, such as education and health care.
Traditionally, the nonprofit sector has served as a
platform for this kind of social innovation.
However, in recent years boundaries between business
and the nonprofit sector have been breaking down as
social entrepreneurs search for more innovative,
cost-effective, and sustainable approaches. This
experimental “sector bending” has created new
opportunities for people with business skills to
make significant contributions in the social sector.
This lecture will define social entrepreneurship,
describe the recent trends that open the door to
business-inspired approaches, and offer some advice
for those who might want to pursue these
opportunities.
Biography
Greg Dees is the founding faculty director of the
Center for the Advancement of Social
Entrepreneurship and an adjunct professor at Duke
University’s Fuqua School of Business. He has taught
at the Yale School of Management, Harvard Business
School, and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
While at Harvard, he helped launch the Initiative on
Social Enterprise and offered the first course on
“Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector,” for which
he won the school’s Apgar Award for Innovation in
Teaching. At Stanford, he was the Miriam and Peter
Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service and
founding faculty co-director of the Center for
Social Innovation. He has written extensively on
social entrepreneurship, recently producing two
books on the topic, with Jed Emerson and Peter
Economy: Enterprising Nonprofits (Wiley, 2001) and
Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs (Wiley,
2002). Prior to his academic career, Greg spent four
years in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.
During his academic career, he took a two-year leave
to work on entrepreneurship in Appalachia at the
Mountain Association for Community Economic
Development in Berea, Kentucky.
