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What Business Can Provide to Social Entrepreneurs

In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Diana Ayton-Shenker, a social impact strategist and the first Nazarian Social Innovator in Residence at Wharton, explains how she works with people and organizations to optimize their impact through social entrepreneurship.

Key takeaways:

“We need new tools. We need new strategies. And drawing from the private business sector is a really creative way we can do our work better. Adopting the language of innovation is important and exciting, because it inherently compels us to constantly iterate and reiterate and renew how we create change. We innovate in that way. So, in those senses, I think the new language reflects a change.”

“I also think it causes a change in how we carry out our work. I also think, though, there is a constant of people’s desire to make a difference, people’s desire to have our work matter, to have our time, our efforts, our energy and our resources generate value. Twitter And I think that that’s a very deep and innate human drive. The fact that we can now articulate that and identify that drive in new vehicles, new options that might engage more people and mobilize more people to realize their potential to make a difference is exciting. And that’s where we are in social innovation and social entrepreneurship.”