Today there is a rising discontentment with both the market and the state as mechanisms for addressing our social, economic and environmental problems. The government is often blamed for stifling creative and innovative initiatives, due to its apathetic bureaucracies, and the market on the other hand, has been accused of ignoring human needs and creating unjustifiable social inequalities. This has led to a progressively frantic search for novel methods that does not rely solely on the market and/or the state to deal with social and environmental problems. Consequently ,there has been an unparalleled growth of ‘social enterprises’ also many times recognized as the ‘civil society’, ‘voluntary sector’, ‘social sector’, ‘mission-based sector’, ‘non-profit sector’ ,‘non-government sector’ etc. Ever since Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and a well-known example of a social enterprise, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 , there has been a mounting interest in social entrepreneurship for economic and social development.
Social entrepreneurship is now a significant field that has encouraged unending discussions and debates within both the academic and practitioner communities. A variety of support organizations have been established for social entrepreneurs , in the recent past ,such as the Skoll Foundation, the Schwab Foundation , Prof Anil Gupta's Honey Bee Network (which works to identify and promote innovation from the grassroots and rural areas).
Prof. Preetam Khandelwal teaches ‘Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Innovation’ and ‘Entrepreneurial Development & New Enterprise Management ‘, at FMS and is the Faculty in charge of E Cell at FMS. She is an accredited Entrepreneurship motivation trainer.
She has served as a Visiting Faculty at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok in 2003. She participated in the Entrepreneurship Education Colloquium on Participant –Centered Learning (EECPCL) organized by the Harvard Business School, Boston, USA in 2008, for which she was awarded the Goldman Sachs full Scholarship. Her current areas of research interest include Social Entrepreneurship and Work – Family interface of Women in Business.
Dr. Preetam Khandelwal,
Professor, FMS Delhi
The Power of Social entrepreneurship for promoting positive social change
E CELL, FMS DELHI
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