Social entrepreneur is someone who recognises a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make a social change. Social entrepreneurs assess their success in terms of the impact they have on society. Social entrepreneurs are agents of change but with an entrepreneurial approach. They are focused on societal problem solving and not with making money. Social entrepreneurs seek fundamental changes in delivery systems and demonstrate a strong commitment to collaboration and co-creation with the community and other stakeholders. It takes time and way too much perseverance when one is aiming for sustainable change in society. Social entrepreneurs reach one milestone and there is something else waiting to be done after that. Scale up and success in case of social venture is not possible without passion, perseverance and persistence and hence, the role of Entrepreneur takes centre stage.

Yours is a very interesting question.  The best question I have encountered so far in research gate.  Clean, forthright.  You can develop a paper out of the question you have posed.  Carry on!

Dear Emmanuel, you have already answered the question you posed. The alternatives given by your are okay, what is left is for the social entrepreneurs is to pick the best possible option that will meet the particular need in question. Ecological factors are important factors to be considered. Effective Implementation could also constitute another crucial factor.

If , identifying the problem is essential not only to combat poverty,  but to increase the viability of projects and actions. The social entrepreneur must ensure that the proposals are defined by stakeholders according to their needs and priorities. In all cases beneficiaries must contribute to the actions and projects (land, labor , materials) , as a measure of ownership and interest. You have to spend time and make participatory workshops for the proper definition of the problems to meet and agree on the forms of participation.

Thank y´all. Salvador, Poor are creative, but I call what they do: "innovation for subsistence" and it´s not for selling to tourist (if we must see this as an income strategy). Even when they combine individual effort to an organization, they still suffer; then, cooperative has a lot of limits.

They need then someone to create new things, innovate socially, with new idea to change the situation. The problem is if this person adopt the NGOs tools (participatory research method), what will be the consequences, will he fail? 

NGO has problem like:

• reach the poorest
• serve the real poors and exclude the less poors
• replying projects elsewhere
• And the number of poor reached. 

While I do not have the answer to this question, I wish to point out one option for putting it in more general terms: how do the demand-side determinants of the nonprofit sector (i.e., social needs) translate into the supply-side determinants (i.e., the energy and capacity of social entrepreneurs)? There is an extensive literature about it. My recent synopsis of this literature is here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280315948_Sustainability_of_Rural_Nonprofit_Organizations_Czech_Republic_and_Beyond

Article Sustainability of Rural Nonprofit Organizations: Czech Repub...

Dear Valentinov, Thank you sharing this paper. It´s very helpful. In this case, is it possible to talk about the failure of the nonprofit sector? 

 Dear Remilien, I would differentiate between two types of failure: failure to meet social needs /demand-side/ and failure to find resources /supply-side/.

Usually for actors in the field of development studies and rural sociology, PPRA, RRA, etc have been used, this can still be used, but they have their limitations. Chambers (1995) talked about participatory rural development approach, Paulo Freire (1968) talked about conscientization of the rural communities to identify their gaps. In all these, NGOs or other development experts look at their area of interests in the community and look further into areas where community members may be having problems, and then ask the community to identify problems associated or faced by their community from a lists of some problems which the social actor wants to fill. we have community gap identification tools like stories with gap, community behavior and practice identification, community problem ranking, community resources map, transect walk and many others. As a social entrepreneur, the method depends on what you want to do in the field. The most common methods are those used by UNICEF, WSSSRP, RUWATSAN for their WASH project in Nigeria, (Check Eneji, et al,(2016), on Water sanitation and hygiene)

Ogar Eneji, Thank you for your comment. Social Engineering or Ingénierie sociale in french, is basically used in the wash sector. PROTOS and HELVETAS are ngo with this concept. Now the question is: Do social entrepreneur have sufficient ressources for conducting such study (of identification)? Also we can enter in the two approaches of projects: Bottom-up & Top-down. 

What is the best project for the community (with subjectivity) ? What does the community want?

Remilien, thanks a great deal, there is no one stop approach to social engineering or entrepreneurship especially when it comes to identifying community gaps.  the best approach is using community need ranking, this is only an aspect of the entire process, but in resent times, people have began depending on community need assessment carried out through the community self help initiatives. Obot, (2013) observe that in community need assessment or identification, since most organizations or individuals (social actors) may not have the required materials, resources and money to carry out community need assessment, they can pick the component that can give them the answer they need and modify it and tailor it to suit their need. you can use stories with a gap, community needs ranking for three groups, men, women and the youths and then place them according to the priority they set for each group. This can be complimented with the community resources mapping. In all these, the researcher must understand and apply both SWOT and SMART-G analysis sir.

Dear Eneji, it is a little difficult I think for the social entrepreneur to realize such studies, I was thinking about this a lot. Let´s say social entrepreneur are not researcher in some cases, then they can fail due to the lack of previous study, market and opportunity don´t work at all in the field of social. If the SE see the challenges and a lot of risk and make cost analysis, this can lead him to give up the venture. The social mission isn´t the main interest. 

I hope to see in the future papers regarding those issues. All the best

In first instance, social entrepreneurs may wish to define what "social" actually means to them. Failure to properly define "social" might result in negative definitions of social entrepreneurship as non-business or non-profit entrepreneurship.

 useful paper

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305035584_Framing_Social_Problems_in_Social_Entrepreneurship

Article Framing Social Problems in Social Entrepreneurship

Emmanuel:

The question you ask, how does the social entrepreneur identify social needs? Is very important. But the idea of planned intervention, which is prevalent by non-governmental organizations and companies with social responsibility, must be changed. It should be promoted that the actors and participants are the ones who build their alternatives and projects. External actors must support, but not direct, much less impose criteria and decisions. One way to identify social needs is to consider the Human Development Indicators and then determine the willingness to participate and the commitment that the stakeholders acquire.

Greetings.