23 February 2016 ~ 0 Comments

Tackling Heropreneurship

tackling-heropreneurship-hero

For the last two years, I have been a part of an incredible community: the Clore Social Leadership Programme. As part of their Fellowship, we each had to conduct research into a topic of interest, and publish it in some way. It didn’t need to be academic research and didn’t need to be published as a formal research report, but it needed to provide some value to the social sector.

My research is called “Tackling Heropreneurship” and it launches today on www.tacklingheropreneurship.com

Check it out…. It includes a report written in a very colloquial style, life maps of nine people who have designed social impact careers from which we can learn, and a tool called the Impact Gaps Canvas.

Screen Shot 2016-02-23 at 09.34.32

The premise of the work is that we are entering an age of Heropreneurship where everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. There is an unspoken social hierarchy with students considering founding a start-up more aspirational that other careers. And when it comes to social impact roles, the myth of the social entrepreneur makes founding a social enterprise more attractive to many students than joining an existing one or working as an intrapreneur in a larger organization.

But wanting to “be” a social entrepreneur is like wanting to be a toothbrush. We don’t need more toothbrushes, we need more clean teeth. People have gotten married to the means rather than the ends. We don’t need more people wanting to “be” social entrepreneurs, we need more people solving global challenges, and that takes a whole range of roles and skills.

The report and accompanying website explore those skills, offers a look at a possible impact career flow chart, and include quotes from some of the 40+ people I interviewed in my research. Dig in and enjoy! I’d love your feedback!