Mapping the prevalence of social entrepreneurs: promoting social entrepreneurship may be a key means of bringing the socially excluded into the enterprise culture.

ARE ENTREPRENEURS always motivated by the desire for personal financial gain? A recent survey has evaluated the extent to which this is the case.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which started in 1999, now involves some 42 countries, and defines entrepreneurship as 'any attempt at new business or new venture creation, such as self-employment, a new business organisation, or the expansion of an existing business by an individual, team of individuals or established business'. To complement this measure of the level of commercial entrepreneurship, the UK GEM consortium also decided to measure, in its 2005 survey, the level of 'social entrepreneurship', by which it broadly means any attempt at new enterprise activity or new enterprise creation where the purpose is to pursue social or community goals rather than personal or shareholder wealth.

In this survey, some 27,296 working-age individuals were interviewed, randomly stratified by UK region. The results, published in the 2006 Social Entrepreneurship Monitor, (1) provide real food for thought for those who might have previously assumed that the vast majority of entrepreneurship is driven by a desire to accumulate personal or shareholder wealth and that enterprise culture is a byword for contemporary capitalist culture.

Beyond profit-driven entrepreneurship

Across the UK in 2005, 6.2 per cent of the working-age population (equivalent to 2.3 million people) were engaged in commercial entrepreneurship and 3.2 per cent of were engaged in social entrepreneurship (1.2 million people). Consequently, more than one in three (34 per cent) of entrepreneurs primarily pursue socially-oriented goals.

As one of the first measures of the prevalence of social entrepreneurship, this is a major and important finding. It reveals that depicting entrepreneurship and enterprise culture as part and parcel of profit-driven capitalism ignores over one-third of all entrepreneurs. An analysis of variations in the nature of entrepreneurship across different socioeconomic groups and geographical areas, outlined below, shows that the profit-driven assumption also snubs particular populations who tend to be far more likely to engage in social entrepreneurship than profit-driven entrepreneurial endeavour.

Socio-economic differences

Although across the UK as a whole some two-thirds of entrepreneurs are driven by personal or shareholder wealth and one-third by social or community goals, there are some significant variations across social groups which have important implications for policy.