Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation along with Roger Martin, a Canadian academic, have decided to venture once more into the no man’s land of the definition of social entrepreneurship. It’s timely; the article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review has come out just prior to the Skoll World Social Entrepreneurship Forum in Oxford, UK next week (where xigi will be presenting its technology roadmap for future development to funders; wish us well).

Here is the meat of their definition: “We define social entrepreneurship as having the following three components: (1) identifying a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve any transformative benefit on its own; (2) identifying an opportunity in this unjust equilibrium, developing a social value proposition, and bringing to bear inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude, thereby challenging the stable state’s hegemony; and (3) forging a new, stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or alleviates the suffering of the targeted group, and through imitation and the creation of a stable ecosystem around the new equilibrium ensuring a better future for the targeted group and even society at large.

Why is it worth laboring, once again, over a definition that large constituencies will never agree to because it flies in the face of with their own, passionately held, theory of change? Here is their answer: “Why bother to tease out these distinctions between various pure and hybrid models? Because with such definitions in hand we are all better equipped to assess distinctive types of social activity. Understanding the means by which an endeavor produces its social benefit and the nature of the social benefit it is targeting enables supporters – among whom we count the Skoll Foundation – to predict the sustainability and extent of those benefits, to anticipate how an organization may need to adapt over time, and to make a more reasoned projection of the potential for an entrepreneurial outcome.”

So it’s an excercise for a particular funder or group of funders who will agree, hopefully, on the definition. Well, people do like to talk about it. As a seven time successful entrepreneur now in my eighth startup, I have never seen a high value in such definitions. Entepreneurs are, as the article says, looking for opporutunity, a discontinuity to exploit. As one VC simplified it for me one day, entrepreneurs break things to create value. How much attention will entrepreneurs pay to a new framework from people who want to analyze and abstract the processes at work on a macro level? Probably not much.

It’s a tool for those wanting standardization in the analysis of the creative process in order to better allocate funds, and I wish them well, and hope their analysis does not cause those getting funding to waste a lot of time responding to the metrics new theories may laden them with. When I was younger I would have offered a less polite response. But I think efforts like this can have merit. The first time somebody asked me my theory of change, I had never heard the term, so I said, “more change in poor people’s pockets.” Since then, I have seen more value in this type of excercise. As long as the transaction cost of measuring does not exceed its value. My friend and xigi co-founder Sara Olsen has a different view, and I respect it.