There are a growing number of events connected to social entrepreneurship. Many of them happen in our home city, demonstrating what an incredible hub of activity Calgary is. The Trico Foundation team is pleased to attend many of them and wish we could attend more.
With our definition of social entrepreneurship at the forefront, Trico Charitable Foundation is committed to the development of the social entrepreneurship ecosystem by helping social enterprises figure out their key issues.
This report sets out to understand if, and how, Canadian post-secondary students might be using tests, experimentation and effective learning to advance a social or environmental cause they are passionate about.
Will this bring about the transformation of capitalism the world needs? It’s a fortuitous moment that could well be a watershed, the potential dawn of a fundamentally new era of social impact.
To zero in on the testing you need, you have to balance two perspectives. On the one hand, you want to be aware of and prepare for all key risks/thresholds as you move from where you are now to what you want your social venture to be when it is in its ‘steady state’ (i.e. your model has proven to be a success and growth is predictable and steady. A typical barometer in this regard is what your venture will look like five years after it starts). This will also help make sure you are building towards your goals rather than building a bridge to nowhere (this is a significant risk for start-ups, as discussed below). On the other hand, a lot of your current assumptions will be wrong, so you don’t want to go into too much detail too far down the road.
Richard’s journey with TAC and Opportunity For All Youth is another example of how social entrepreneurship can stem from pivoting in a new direction and thinking about succession planning of your social enterprise. This is a pattern Trico Foundation and others are seeing in terms of scale: it isn’t necessarily a bigger social enterprise, it is about using the knowledge you gained from the social enterprise in a different way on a whole new level.