Bill Drayton
Collaborative Entrepreneurship
How Social Entrepreneurs Can Tip the
World by Working in Global Teams
The world, for 10,000 years, has been run by just a few people. This pattern is so
archetypal that it is very hard for people to imagine anything different.
Tuttavia, this pattern is dying. It does not work. As the rate of change acceler-
ates, and as change comes from ever more sources, the model of a few people sit-
ting on top of everyone else doing repetitive tasks simply cannot cope.
Nonetheless, it is still pervasive, still dominant—in how we are organized and in
how we think.
The new model is already here. It is a world where everyone is a changemaker,
not just a tiny elite.1 You can see its principles at work in the world’s most success-
ful organizations and regions—be it the Jesuits or Silicon Valley.
This new world will be a global team of teams, teams that come together in
varying combinations, scales and intensities as the need requires. The faster things
change, the more the world will need this giant, fast-moving kaleidoscope of
teams. A team is a team only when all its members are players; and in a world
defined by escalating change, they can only be players if they can contribute to
change.
Social entrepreneurs are essential in this “everyone a changemaker” world.
They conceive and engineer the basic new patterns. They are highly contagious
role models encouraging many, many others to care and to organize. They are also
mass recruiters of local changemakers—that is overwhelmingly how they spread
their ideas. In their turn these local changemakers are role models and recruiters
for yet more local changemakers, and a few of them will become the next genera-
tion of great entrepreneurs.
Most important, social entrepreneurs are essential if this rapidly emerging
world where all the basic systems are ever in flux is not to spin off in one ill direc-
Bill Drayton is the founder and current CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, UN
citizen movement dedicated to finding and fostering social entrepreneurs worldwide.
Drayton is also board chair of Get America Working!, a nonpartisan, fuller employ-
ment policy citizen group. Named by US News & World Report as one of America’s
25 Best Leaders in 2005, he pioneered the concept of and coined the phrase “social
entrepreneurship.”
© 2011 Bill Drayton
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Bill Drayton
tion or another. Right now, Per esempio, privacy is under sustained attack because
preventative surveillance is more and more needed, the cost of connecting the dots
has all but vanished, and many communications business entrepreneurs profit by
accessing client information and selling it to others for a profit. Who has the inter-
est and focused power to spot and get the overall system back on track?
It is the social entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur’s job is to change the big sys-
tems. And what defines the social entrepreneur is that, to the core of their being,
they are committed to serving
the good of all.
Success used to be mastering
knowledge and the rules
(remember your report card?).
This worked reasonably well in
a static society. Tuttavia, it no
longer is enough.
This is, Tuttavia, not a role
solo entrepreneurs are well
placed to serve. What is needed
is a team of the world’s best
social entrepreneurs in an issue
area that has become ripe entre-
preneuring together.
That is the most powerful
engine available to keep the
world’s systems moving in the
right direction.
And such collaborative entrepreneurship is precisely what Ashoka has been
working for over a decade to design and develop. A dozen such collaborations are
now advancing rapidly.
How does it work?
Primo, the launch only comes when across the globe several hundred leading
social entrepreneurs have committed their lives to causing big change in an issue
area. When these top entrepreneurs (and over half the Ashoka Fellows have
changed national policy within five years of their launch) move, we have the most
persuasive possible open source indication that an issue area is ripe.
We then look closely at all these entrepreneurs’ proven ideas, assembling the
pieces together into a mosaic that allows us to see the overall picture and the most
important, cioè., the most future-defining, new cross-cutting patterns.
The hardest step comes next—identifying the new paradigm that will define
the field in the future. Understanding the questions the patterns seek to answer
usually provides very useful clues.
Once we know where the field must go, we must identify the one or two things
that must happen if the world is to make this leap.
And then we must make them in fact happen.
Which is when the full entrepreneurial force of the hundreds of top entrepre-
neurs collaborating together comes into full play. If we can together make those
few critical things happen in seven to ten key places on the planet, we can tip the
mondo. (They are: (1) the core five—China, Indonesia, India, Brasile, and the U.S.,
plus (2) German-speaking Europe, Japan, the Arab world, the Spanish speakers,
and the French speakers.) This is a new, unprecedented force in the world.
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Collaborative Entrepreneurship
Ashoka now has a dozen of these collaborative entrepreneurship thrusts in
varying stages, including three in the final tipping stages.
Per esempio, IL 700 (Di 3,000) Ashoka Fellows focused on children and young
people have enabled us through this collaborative entrepreneurship process to rec-
ognize that a world defined by change requires people to have different skills than
before—and that this means the paradigm that defines what success in growing up
is must change.
Success used to be mastering knowledge and the rules (remember your report
card?). This worked reasonably well in a static society. Tuttavia, it no longer is
Abbastanza. Per esempio, the faster things change, less and less of a person’s life can be
guided by the rules: They have not been developed or are in conflict and/or are
changing. Whomever has not mastered the complex, learned skill of empathy, will
hurt others and disrupt groups—and will be marginalized—i.e., thrown out—
regardless of the computer science or other knowledge they have.
The new paradigm focuses on the social skills a person must have to be able to
contribute in an “everyone a changemaker” world: (1) every child must master
empathy and (2) every teen must be a changemaker (practice is the only way to
mastery here) using all four of the core skills—empathy/teamwork/leadership/
changemaking. If a fifteen-year-old is not practicing changemaking now (per esempio., by
creating a tutoring service or a virtual radio station with friends), she will be at
major risk when she is thirty since these skills will be all but required.
Ashoka has collaborative entrepreneurship efforts underway for both children
and young people. The “Every Child Must Master Empathy” team, Per esempio, È
setting out to tip the ten key areas of the world using the jujitsu of two easily acces-
sible levers. Primo, the team seeks to get a representative five percent of the influen-
tial schools to adopt the new paradigm. (That’s 50 A 60 del 90,000 schools in
the U.S., Per esempio). Secondo, it seeks to help thirty “maven” intellectual interme-
diaries, especially writers and publishers, to grasp the new strategic “everyone a
changemaker” environment and what it requires, and then the consequent new
paradigm of what success is growing up now must be. These two elements, Di
course, feed one another strongly. Educators who love leading and have experi-
enced what happens when all their children master empathy at a high level, E
who own their approach to doing so, will want to spread their new model and will
quickly be off to see the most influential writers they know. Since such stories and
enthusiasm are, Ovviamente, exactly what the writers need, there soon will be a rap-
idly expanding contagion of educator advocate/writer and writer/writer and
schools competing interactions.
Ashoka will not commit to a collaborative entrepreneurship effort unless it
sees such jujitsu leverage. No entrepreneur, not even a global team of entrepre-
neurs, can tip the world through his or her own force.
Even more important is the heart of collaborative entrepreneurship, active,
entrepreneuring leadership by a global team of teams (one for each priority area,
for example the U.S.) of many of the top social entrepreneurs in the field. They
know which schools are the most influential and who to talk to and who not to
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Bill Drayton
approach. They know and are respected by the key intellectual intermediaries and
influencers. They have created and are ever refining the tools that work. They
attract the necessary resources; they do much of the work; and they create the new
solutions at each step of what has to be a journey of iterative adaptation and cre-
ativity.
The leaders of each of the component teams bring complementary innova-
tions and skills. The North American “Every Child Must Master Empathy” team
has among its leaders, Per esempio:
• Mary Gordon (Toronto, Ontario) enables all children to grasp empathy by
bringing an infant (“the professor”) and a parent to class.
• Jill Vialet (San Francisco) is bringing back recess, largely through group play,
Quale, Ovviamente, is one of the best ways for children to practice empathy.
• Eric Dawson (Boston) is making the classroom also a place where children
practice empathy all the time.
• Molly Barker (Charlotte) helps girls in fifth through eighth grades, when many
lose confidence, regain it (and avoid the “mean girl” syndrome).
Another and quite different area of collaborative entrepreneurship collapses
the heretofore not only separate but not communicating business and social pro-
duction and distribution systems that historically have served almost every need,
be it irrigation or housing, into one. Doing so ends many major market failures
and dramatically profits business, the citizen sector, and the ultimate clients.
Per esempio, in a year and a half, another global collaborative entrepreneur-
ship team has been able to generate $120 million in private financing and has
10,000 new homes either built or under construction for urban informal sector
workers in India. The business builders and finance firms could not build for a
vegetable seller’s family because they have neither paperwork (per esempio., pay records)
nor cross-class comfort. The citizen sector knows these informal sector workers,
has low cost, and has trust—but is hopeless as a real estate developer or builder. If
the citizen sector does the marketing, selecting, and servicing functions and leaves
construction to business, the new hybrid system solves the previous failure of
either party to deliver. India still has 24.7 million missing units; but this new
modello, now that it has been demonstrated and is clearly so very profitable for
everyone, is spreading explosively.2
Collaborative Entrepreneurship is, we believe, well on the way to becoming the
core way our field truly changes the world. Ashoka is developing the model and the
initial framework. Once the pattern is established, more and more teams will
spring up and probably connect through networks such as Changemakers.com.
1. See Bill Drayton (2006), “Everyone a Changemaker: Social Entrepreneurship’s Ultimate Goal,"
Innovations 1:1 (Inverno): pag. 80-96.
2. For a full description see “A New Alliance for Global Change” in the September 2010 Harvard
Business Review.
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