The term became mostly popular with the Grameen bank – the bank for the poor. Grameen bank was started by Mohammad Yunus to lend the money to the poor. Mohammad Yunus introduced the term Social enterprise which is a hybrid of NGO (Mission Driven), Government (Scalable) and a Private organization ( Market Driven).
A similar word used by Bill gates for socially-driven innovative enterprise is “Creative Capitalism”.
We are not a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). As the name denotes, NGO’s are primarily driven by the work that the government is not able to do well. For example: One of the government functions is to provide education to all children. When the government does not have the resources to do that, it takes help from NGOs, so that education could be reached to the most marginalized people.
However, a social enterprise is primarily driven by innovation. Innovation doesn’t have to be completely new but new to the market it is serving. To drive innovation, Monkey Sports has taken a design thinking approach i.e customer-centric approach.
The four main feature of a social enterprise are:
- Innovation
- Scalability
- Financially Sustainable
- Impact Driven