This Course will clarify the definition and meaning of Social Entrepreneurship and will focus on the need to learn about the source and root of a social problem. You will be introduced to different perspectives about Social Entrepreneurship and you will learn about complementary and opportunistic assets which will help you to detect an opportunity and develop an idea of how to create a business for social change. From a practical perspective you will be asked to initiate a team formation process and start to think about a problem topic that you want to address with your social venture in the future. You will work in a team to research this topic and will gradually start to think about a particular opportunity and identify a purpose for your social venture project.
Case | The Story of Specialisterne
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來自 Copenhagen Business School 的課程
Identifying Social Entrepreneurship Opportunities
96 個評分
從本節課中
Who is a Social Entrepreneur
With Module 3 you have reached halftime of Course 1. Congratulations! This Module will answer the question what it takes people to become Entrepreneurs. In addition you will be introduced to the concept of a Community Enterprise. Your personal challenge will be to define your future role within your project team and to think about how to find opportunities to address social problems.
與講師見面
Kai Hockerts
Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility
Welcome Rob Austin, a colleague of ours, here at the Copenhagen Business School who
himself has worked directly, with Thorkil Sonne, the founder of Specialisterne.
Rob, could you tell us a little bit more about the early days of Specialisterne?
>> Yeah, now it's, it's a, it's a very interesting story.
It's a very personal story.
Thorkil Sonne had two children at the time.
He was working for an IT firm or he was working in IT for
a telecommunications firm here in Denmark and his career was going great.
He had just recently been given
a prime assignment, something that was very good for
his career within the company, and his third child was born.
His name was Lars and Lars exhibited some behavioral, unusualness.
Lars, had difficulty playing with other children.
They began to, at first they didn't think very much of it, but
they began to consult with people about it eventually, and at age three,
I think it was, Lars was diagnosed with autism.
Which was a very big deal. I think it kind of turned the world upside down for them.
They left the city and moved to the suburbs where they thought there would be
sort of a quieter and better experience for Lars.
But Thorkil began worrying and thinking about, as a parent would,
what the future held for his son who had autism.
And when you looked at the statistics it wasn't very,
happy, it wasn't a happy story.
Not very many people with autism are employed.
I think the number that comes to mind, I couldn't tell you the source, but
it's about 6% that are employed full time in the workforce.
And so this was not a happy story.
He began thinking about wanting to do something about that.
If we flash forward a ways, now as I said, he was an IT manager.
And he had lots of experiences where he was managing IT projects and
software development projects and he saw his son,
I think Lars was seven years old at the time,
completing a drawing, a very elaborate drawing with lots of numbers on it and
he didn't know what it was.
It was kind of indiscernible and Lars couldn't really explain what it was, but
later he was looking through a map book.
A book of maps of Europe and he realized in just a moment that
what he was looking at, what Lars had drawn, was the index page from the map
book, and he had reproduced it entirely by memory. It's a picture of Europe,
divided into many, many, many grids, each of the grids with a page number and
Lars had reproduced not only the drawing of Europe, but
every single page number with perfect accuracy.
And he recognized in that not only,
not only do people with autism have difficulties,
they also have profound abilities, and that became the basis for
deciding to try to create a company based on the abilities of people with autism,
not the disabilities but the special abilities.
>> Many parents have children with autism.
What made Thorkil Sonne special?
Why did he act?,
wanting do something about helping?
>> Yeah that's a good question, what is it that made Thorkil different? Why did he
take his experiences and make a business or a social enterprise out of them.
I think partly it was circumstance.
He was at that time, working in a position that made him see what Lars was
able to do in a very special light.
He was strongly motivated as I guess any parent of an autistic child would be to
think about the future of his child but he also had the advantage of, of insight.
Surely there is something that, you know, something to the idea that he
is a particularly enterprising individual so
I think there are probably some personal factors as well.
But I think a big part of it was that aha insight that, that looking at
Lars, what he'd been able to do with this map picture and realizing that
those are exactly the abilities he looked for in part of his professional life.
Specifically from people who test software.
>> And how did the, how did the story evolve, so
from the moment he says I would like to start a business.
I want it to be with people with autism,
towards the point where he actually has a running business model.
He probably didn't hit the ground running right away.
>> He didn't hit the ground running right away.
He first had to figure out how to finance the business.
And he did it, a fairly simple way.
He remortgaged his house.
Which, it's a simple way, it's a frightening way, I think.
I mean it, it reveals, also that he has a certain tolerance for risk.
Because if this business doesn't go well,
he has trouble keeping his house, where his family lives.
So you can imagine this was fairly, strongly felt.
He began looking for people to hire.
They also had to work out how this business works because there had
never been a business like this before.
Uh, one of the things they had to be able to do is, assess
people with autism.
Not everyone who has autism is the same.
We're different.
People who are neurotipical, as, as they like to put it within Specialisterne.
We're all different, so are people with autism.
So, not everybody on the autism spectrum, not every person is well-suited
to what Thorkil would have them do, as part of his social enterprise.
So, they needed a very good process for assessing.
They needed a very good process for
training, and all of that had to be developed, um, basically,
using the funds that he had available from remortgaging his house at first.
Eventually he got a contract with his former employer, and
that was very important to beginning to provide some revenues.
But this was a bootstrap model, he did not immediately go find venture capitalists,
or some outside fund.
He also very strongly felt, when I first talking,
started talking with him, that it was important that this was a
for-profit business that, that allowed the people
with autism to demonstrate that they were being paid because they were valuable.
Not because it was some form of charity, and so he felt very strongly, that for
full alignment, to do the best for the people involved, but
also to make the business a sustainable business, that it had to deliver more
value than it cost, and the proposition, the proposition for
customers in this business, has always been, as far as I understand, not:
Do a favor for society or do a favor for us. It's always been: We deliver
a lot of value, we deliver more value than anyone else in this segment so, choose us.
Do you have any suggestions for
the students of this MOOC who want to start their own social enterprises,
how to go about identifying on the one hand the social need and after,
on the other hand to see the business opportunities, the business models?
>> Well that's a, I think it's
a hard question, how one should go about spotting opportunities.
There are more systematic versions of that.
I used to be the dean of a business school in Canada.
And we had entrepreneurship programs.
And we had a course called Market Opportunity Identification.
And you always hear the story of Jeff Bezos where he started with,
I don't know how many, 130 ideas.
And successively analyzed and
worked through them until he had one left, which became Amazon.
The story of Specialisterne is not like that.
The story of Specialisterne has been a very personal cause that found expression
in a social enterprise for some fairly personal reasons but also because of
an opportunity that appeared, that, you know,
kind of burst, in as part of an insight that Thorkil Sonne had.
So I guess one of the things I would say is to stay very open to, to idiosyncratic
possibilities. The successful idea may come from a very unexpected direction.
But if you create conditions where you're strongly motivated and
you're aware and open to things that might happen,
value that might come from an unexpected direction,
I think that's the right mindset.
One of the things that I think is very important in
this story is how much this has actually meant to the people who are employed
by this company.
There in, when we wrote the case we heard about,
an email that a mother sent to Thorkil Sonne.
And the email said, it said very simply: Dear Mr. Sonne.
You don't know me but I am crying as I write this. You hired my son,
two months ago and he is happy for the first time since he started school.
And so this joy factor, this human factor I think is
one of the very biggest things that we could point to in
why this is a wonderful story.
>> Thank you very much, Rob, for giving us this introduction to Specialisterne and
we'll be looking forward to seeing what our students come up
with in terms of opportunities and business models.
>> And I'll look forward to that too, thanks.
