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46 Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies

world. In the United States it has undergone substantial adaptation to accommodate itself to a very different economy (e.g., the need for much larger loan amounts).

■ Utilizing a new source of labor or other production inputs. Greyston Bakery of Yonkers, New York, operates a bakery that produces high-quality baked goods for restaurants and hotels using ex-convicts and other “unemployable” indivi- duals as bakery workers. In a social entrepreneurship situation such as this one, the focus is on putting unemployed people to work, as opposed to a business entrepreneurship model that might seek to hire these individuals as inexpensive labor or, more commonly, not to hire them at all. As Greyston Bakery puts it, “We don’t hire people to bake brownies; we bake brownies to hire people.”

■ Implementing a new organizational or industrial structure. Community development banks are private banks, like their commercial banking cousins; however, they do not offer checking accounts or access to safe deposit boxes. Instead, they sell certificates of deposit to their investors and use the money to invest in the development of their communities in a variety of ways. They typically invest where private banks will not (e.g., loans for the creation of minority-owned small businesses and for projects that benefit disadvantaged members of the community). As an example, the Louisville [Kentucky] Community Development Bank made a substantial loan to a nursing home for elderly, low-income, minority individuals so that the home could make major repairs to its leaky roof.

■ Implementing new ways of engaging “customers” or target beneficiaries. A relatively new nonprofit social venture in New York City called Blue Skies (now part of the Robin Hood Foundation) uses the Internet to consolidate information on social service programs in the area and streamline the applica- tion process for its users. This system engages social service beneficiaries in very different ways than the highly fragmented traditional system has.

■ The utilization of new funding models. As is discussed in Chapter 7, the funding of nonprofit social ventures, in particular, has departed dramatically from a dependence on the traditional philanthropic sources to a greater reliance on the generation of earned income.

Innovation provides the link between ideas and opportunities. Innovation involves the implementation of ideas. This implies, of course, that those ideas are implementable. Opportunities are implementable ideas. But how do we know whether an idea is implementable? The short answer to this question is that we test the idea in advance of pursuing it further. This reduces the chance of failure and its consequent wasting of resources—financial, physical, human, and social. The longer answer follows.

Lyons, T. S., & Kickul, J. (2016). Understanding social entrepreneurship : The relentless pursuit of mission in an ever changing world. Taylor & Francis Group. Created from unt on 2023-07-07 17:50:25.

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Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies 47

OPPORTUNITY RECOGNITION

Clearly, opportunity recognition involves movement from an idea to an oppor- tunity. Timmons and Spinelli (2007, p. 116) describe this process as “transforming caterpillars into butterflies.” We know what an idea is, but what is an opportunity? If opportunities are implementable ideas, what makes them implementable?

To begin to answer these questions, we attempt to establish a working definition of “opportunity.” Timmons and Spinelli (2007) describe the key characteristics of a business opportunity as including:

■ the ability to add value for the customer; ■ adding value by solving a customer problem or fulfilling a customer need; ■ the ability to capture a market and generate profits; and ■ compatibility with the skill set of the entrepreneurs who pursue them.

Mariotti (2007, p. 18) simply defines an opportunity as “an idea that is based on what customers need or want.” Barringer and Ireland (2008, p. 38) state that “[a]n opportunity is a favorable set of circumstances that creates a need for a new product service, or business.” These latter authors go on to identify the “essential qualities” of an opportunity: attractiveness, timeliness, durability and basis in a product that adds value for the customer (Barringer & Ireland, 2008, p. 39).

Common to all of these definitions is the idea of adding value for the customer. Marketing experts call this the value proposition—that aspect of the product or service that causes customers to choose to buy it over its competitors. This, in turn, suggests that the product or service in question is addressing a need or want of the customer that the competition is not attending to. While crucial, adding value for the customer is not the only criterion that must be satisfied in order to judge an idea to be a true opportunity, however. The ability to financially sustain the enterprise must be apparent (i.e., a large enough market that it can cover its costs and generate a profit) and the timing must be right (an open “window of opportunity”).

With these things in mind, our working definition of opportunity might look something like this:

An opportunity is a business concept for a product or service that adds value to the lives of its customers by uniquely addressing an identified need or desire in a way that takes advantage of existing market conditions and the skill set of the entrepreneur(s) and ensures the financial viability of the enterprise delivering the product or service.

To this point, we have been discussing opportunity from the perspective of business entrepreneurship. How might this be translated for the social entrepre- neurship world? Like business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs need to identify

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48 Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies

the needs and wants of their “customers”—the target beneficiaries of their efforts. Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, refers to this as a “job” that the customer needs to have done for them (Christensen & Raynor, 2003). Presumably, this is a job that the customer is either unable or unwilling to do for themselves. In social entrepreneurship it is most likely the former; therefore, the question for the social entrepreneur is “How can I do this job for this target beneficiary in a unique way that improves her or his life?”

Like business opportunities, social opportunities have a “window of opportunity.” This is the time period within which the social entrepreneur can provide maximum benefit to her or his customer before circumstances change, diminishing the value of the service. A window of opportunity might be opened by an event, a change in political regime and accompanying policy, a demographic shift, or an emerging trend. The earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 was a single event that opened the window of opportunity for social entrepreneurs who sought to help the victims of that disaster. The Reagan administration’s decision to close government-funded facilities for the mentally ill and effectively put many of them on the streets in the 1980s presented an opportunity for social entrepreneurs to devise new ways to help these individuals. The trend toward an increasing number of single-parent households in the United States has created opportunities to fulfill the needs of both these parents and their children through social entrepreneurship. Windows of social opportunity may be closed when the given need has been fulfilled and new needs emerge, when an identified trend ends or is reversed, when a political regime changes, or when a particular idea or perspective is no longer in good currency.

Social opportunities are also like business opportunities in that they must be financially sustainable for the enterprise that pursues them. While social ventures that are nonprofit in structure do not need to turn a profit, they do need to at least break even and, better still, generate excess revenue. With the rise of for- profit social enterprise, there really is no difference between social and business entrepreneurship in this regard. Thus, our working definition of opportunity would seem to work for both types of entrepreneurship.

Having defined opportunity, we can now turn our attention to “recognizing” it. In fact, a big part of recognition lies in knowing what it is that you are looking for. The real challenge lies in systematizing the recognition process so that it can be repeated with some measure of consistency in its predictive power. This must be done with the understanding, however, that there is no foolproof way to forecast the success of an entrepreneurial endeavor before it begins. This is due to the fact that entrepreneurship is an organic process, not a mechanistic one. The road from point A to point B is not a straight line but a circuitous path. An entrepreneur is laying the tracks just ahead of the train (Lichtenstein & Lyons, 2010). With this acknowledged, we will look at some of the tools that have been created for helping entrepreneurs to reduce their risk in their efforts to ascertain whether or not an idea is an opportunity.

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Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies 49

Opportunity Recognition Tools

Tools for the purpose of assessing ideas to determine their potential as an opportunity tend to fall into two broad categories: (1) tools that evaluate the internal and external contexts within which the enterprise pursuing the opportunity operates and the tangible and intangible resources necessary and available; and (2) tools that attempt to comprehensively evaluate the attractiveness of the idea relative to criteria such as industry, market, economics, competition, management, and the personal goals of the entrepreneur. We explore each of these types of tools for assessing business opportunities in turn, and then apply them to social opportunities.

The environmental scan, more commonly referred to as the SWOT analysis, from strategic planning is a common tool for evaluating ideas. It is commonly pre- scribed in books on business planning as a way of offering a rationale for a business concept being proposed in the plan. It permits the entrepreneur to examine the implementation of the idea by strengths and weaknesses that are internal to the operations of the enterprise that will pursue the idea and by threats and oppor- tunities presented by the external environment in which the enterprise operates.

Strengths and weaknesses may include a wide variety of factors: the skill set of the entrepreneur and/or her or his team, organizational structure, available financial and physical resources, and so forth. These are current strengths and weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses are often two sides of the same coin—as the ancient Greeks observed, one’s greatest strength may also be one’s “Achilles heel.” Listing an idea’s strengths and weaknesses helps the entrepreneur to think these things through systematically, reducing the probability that an important consideration will be missed.

Similarly, a list of the future threats and opportunities potentially afforded by the context can be quite varied: changes in the industry, changes in the economy, changes in the political landscape and resultant policy and regulatory alterations, market shifts, and the like. Accounting for these forces the entrepreneur needs to think about contingencies and whether or not the enterprise could survive the contextual shift. Again, certain events may harbor both an opportunity and a threat.

A complete SWOT analysis must not stop with a mere listing of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It must also examine the interactions. For example, how might a particular strength be used to thwart an impending threat or leverage an emerging opportunity? If an idea holds up to this scrutiny and still looks viable, it may well be an opportunity.

Drawing extensively on the SWOT analysis model is the Outside-In/Inside-Out Analysis model (Longenecker et al., 2006). This latter model assesses ideas for their potential as opportunities by looking at the prospective impact of the outside context (defined as the “general environment” and the “industry environment”) on the proposed enterprise and at the internal capacity of the enterprise to act (Longenecker et al., 2006).

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50 Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies

In the Outside-In Analysis the general environment includes the following factors: political/legal, socio-cultural, macroeconomic, global, and technological (Longenecker et al., 2006, p. 56). The industry environment takes into account Porter’s five competitive factors: new competitors in the industry, products or services that can be substituted for those of the enterprise under analysis, rivalry among competitors, the influence of suppliers, and the influence of buyers (Porter, 2008). All of these things will either positively or negatively influence the ability of an idea to be attractive and sustainable.

Outside-In Analysis tells us how opportunities might be shaped, but this is only half of the assessment. It is also important to understand how capable the entre- preneur and the enterprise are of carrying the idea forward to the market. Such an understanding involves an assessment of internal resources (tangible and intangible) and capabilities (skills and core competencies). The results of the Outside-In and the Inside-Out analyses can then be blended and assessed using a standard SWOT analysis (described above).

The more comprehensive opportunity assessment tools seem to find their origins in the work of entrepreneurship educator and researcher William D. Bygrave. Bygrave (Bygrave & Zacharakis, 2004) established a set of criteria to be evaluated relative to the “attractiveness” of the idea being assessed. For each criterion, he provided a brief profile of what that criterion would look like if it were to achieve either its highest potential or its lowest potential. In this way, Bygrave created a spectrum within which to assess each criterion within a comprehensive evaluation of an idea. For example, one of his market criteria was “Customers.” He identified the highest potential of this criterion to be “Reachable; purchase orders” and the lowest to be “Loyal to others or unreachable.” Presumably, many ideas will fall somewhere between these two end points, where the customer base is not entirely reachable but not without hope of being reached.

Bygrave identified seven major areas for assessment: Industry and Market, Economics, Harvest Issues, Competitive Advantage Issues, Management Team, Personal Criteria, and Strategic Differentiation. He broke each of these areas down into several specific criteria. As an example, Industry and Market comprised the criteria Market (which was further disaggregated into Customers, User Benefits, Value Added, and Product Life), Market Structure, Market Size, Growth Rate, Market Capacity, Market Share Attainable (Year 5), and Cost Structure (Bygrave & Zacharakis, 2004). Thus, he provided a very thorough tool for assessing a business opportunity.

Timmons and Spinelli (2007, pp. 170–171) adapted Bygrave’s model into a tool they called QuickScreen. QuickScreen follows the Bygrave approach of nested criteria, with a higher potential to lower potential range for each. However, QuickScreen, as its names implies, takes a more streamlined approach. There are only three major assessment areas: “Market and Margin Related Issues,” “Competitive Advantages: Relative to the Current and Evolving Set of Competitors,” and “Value

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Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies 51

Creation and Realization Issues.” The parameters on each criterion are more concise and sharper. For example, one of the Market and Margin Related Issues criteria is “Need/want/problem/pain-point.” It is considered higher potential if the Need is “Identified” and lower potential if the Need is “Unfocused.” QuickScreen also offers higher average/lower ranges for some criteria (e.g., “Exit/Liquidity,” “Timing,” and “Barriers to Entry”). Finally, QuickScreen allows the entrepreneur doing the assess- ment to consider the idea’s “Overall Potential” and make “Go,” “No Go,” and “Go, If ” decisions.

Bygrave and Zacharakis (2008) offer another variation on the Bygrave model, which they call the Opportunity Checklist. They use many of the same criteria but add a few unique ones of their own: “Psychographics” (under “Customer”), “Stealth Competitors” (under “Competition”), and major assessment areas of “Government” and “Global Environment.” Another interesting feature of the Opportunity Checklist is the scale for assessment for each criterion. Rather than providing a range from higher to lower, Bygrave and Zacharakis simply permit the entre- preneur to evaluate the idea as a “Better Opportunity” or a “Weaker Opportunity.”

While business entrepreneurs have several opportunity recognition, or assess- ment, tools from which to choose, social entrepreneurs have substantially less guidance in this area. Kitzi provides an opportunity assessment model for non- profit social ventures (Dees et al., 2001, pp. 53–54). It is a version of Bygrave’s model that has been substantially stripped down, in terms of the number of crite- ria, and modified to reflect a focus on social mission. The Kitzi model evaluates social ideas on three broad dimensions: social value potential, market potential, and sustainability potential. It assesses each criterion as falling in a range of high to low. While the model is very useful for assessing opportunities for social ventures with a nonprofit structure, it no longer reflects the rapidly changing nature of social entrepreneurship, which places a new emphasis on for-profit ventures and earned income activities by nonprofits.

In light of this reality, we offer a new opportunity assessment model that reflects both Kitzi’s and Bygrave’s thinking as well as insights from other models based on Bygrave’s. Our model attempts to capture both the pursuit of social value and the market-driven aspects of business opportunities. This model, which we call the Social Opportunity Assessment Tool, can be found in Figure 3.1.

USING THE SOCIAL OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT TOOL

A quick perusal of the Social Opportunity Assessment Tool reveals that it has four major assessment categories: Social Value Potential, Market Potential, Competitive Advantage Potential, and Sustainability Potential. Within each of these categories are five criteria by which to evaluate the idea under study. The tool then permits the prospective social entrepreneur to develop composite ratings for each

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52 Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies

Social Value Potential

Criterion Strong Opportunity Weak Opportunity

Social need Service or product directly addresses an identified need

Service or product addresses need only indirectly

Mission alignment Service or product is in direct alignment with mission

Service or product is only indirectly aligned or is misaligned with mission

Achievable impact Service or product can fulfill identified social need in a measurable way

Service or product will only minimally address the need

Social return on investment (SROI)

A strong effectiveness to cost ratio

A weak effectiveness to cost ratio, or costs exceed impact

Community support Service or product will be positively perceived and endorsed by the community

Service or product will not be well accepted by the community

Market Potential

Criterion Strong Opportunity Weak Opportunity

Customer need or want Target beneficiary both needs and wants the service or product

Target beneficiary is indifferent to the service or product

Window of opportunity Timing is good Timing is poor

Investor interest Evidence of philanthropic, government, or private-sector financial interest

Evidence of little or no interest by philanthropic, governmental, or private investors

Market size Large Small

Market share attainable An open market, with little or no competition

Very competitive market, with several substitutors

Competitive Advantage Potential

Criterion Strong Opportunity Weak Opportunity

Barriers to entry High, many Low or nonexistent

Prospective partnerships or alliances

Many potential partners Few potential partners

Control over costs Substantial control Little or no control

Compelling mission Highly compelling; widespread sympathy

Less compelling; little understanding or sympathy

Management team Strong, complete skill set Incomplete skill set

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Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies 53

assessment category and for the four categories combined. This should provide ample guidance for deciding whether or not to proceed with creating the social venture.

Before we look more closely at the tool, interpret the assessment criteria, and discuss where to find or develop the data for conducting the assessment, we would emphasize that this is intended to be a pre-launch test. Therefore, the idea is being assessed in advance of any action being taken on it. It is intended to force entrepreneurs to think through their idea before investing time and resources on it. If the assessment yields a positive result, they can proceed with relative confidence to pursue their genuine opportunity. If the results of the assessment are negative, they can abandon the idea before incurring any losses. In order for this to work, however, a social entrepreneur must be willing to be honest with her- or himself in carrying out the assessment. It is very easy for entrepreneurs to fall in love with their idea and delude themselves into believing that it will work despite strong evidence to the contrary.

FIGURE 3.1 The Social Opportunity Assessment Tool

Sustainability Potential

Criterion Strong Opportunity Weak Opportunity

Venture capacity Sufficient physical resources to start and maintain the venture

Insufficient physical resources to start and maintain the venture

Venture capability Sufficiently skilled entrepreneur(s), staff, and board

Insufficiently skilled entrepreneur(s), staff, and board

Investor interest Evidence of philanthropic, government, or private-sector financial interest

Evidence of little or no interest by philanthropic, governmental, or private investors

Ability to generate earned income

High potential for charging user fees and/or selling goods or services

Low potential for charging user fees and/or selling goods or services

Compelling mission Highly compelling; widespread sympathy

Less compelling; little understanding or sympathy

Overall Potential

Social value potential High Medium Low

Market potential High Medium Low

Competitive advantage potential High Medium Low

Sustainability potential High Medium Low

Composite potential High Medium Low

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54 Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies

That said, it is entirely possible to derive a “false negative” from this process. This could, in turn, scare an entrepreneur away from a social opportunity the weaknesses of which might be overcome through motivation and resourcefulness. As Tim McCullum of Madecasse observed in Chapter 2, sometimes it’s better not to know what you can’t do. Nevertheless, we urge prospective social entrepreneurs to put their ideas through an opportunity assessment because the systematic process will likely open their eyes to unanticipated strengths and weaknesses. The choice as to whether or not to proceed is the prospective entrepreneur’s alone.

Whenever we ask a class of our social entrepreneurship students to put a social idea through an opportunity assessment, we have observed an interesting and recurring phenomenon. Invariably, one or more students in the class will express frustration with the assignment. They will ask the following question: Because my idea is about something new that no one has ever done before, how can I be expected to predict how it will work, and where will I be able to find data to test it? This is a fair question.

The answer lies in understanding that such an assessment must be handled as a “what if ” scenario. If I pursue this idea, what is likely to happen? Is it likely to have customers? Will investors want to put their money behind it? Will the community in which it is implemented support it? Will it have a measurable social impact? Obviously, none of these questions can be answered definitively: however, by examining the experiences and outcomes of comparable efforts, we can draw some preliminary conclusions about their likely answers.

Where can this kind of information be found? It can be discovered in articles and books about the social problem(s) to be addressed; in case studies of similar social ventures; from relevant industry associations (e.g., housing groups, education associations, literacy groups, associations of foster children); from the financial records of nonprofits (which are a matter of public record and can be found on the Internet); from other social ventures in the same industry that are not competitors; by conducting interviews with prospective customers; in directories of foundations and other philanthropic sources; and so forth.

While most of this information will not be a precise fit with the situation of the proposed social venture, it will be close enough to allow informed assumptions to be made and to permit interpolation and extrapolation of data to better fit the circumstances being tested. The important idea here is that prospective entre- preneurs who engage in opportunity assessment should perceive themselves not as describing the present but, instead, as predicting the future based on a comparable past. When this latter mind-frame is accepted and adopted, the work becomes easier.

What follows is an examination of the Social Opportunity Assessment Tool itself. This examination is broken down by major assessment factors, with a discussion of the criteria within each factor.

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Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies 55

Social Value Potential

In order for an idea to be a viable social opportunity, it must have the potential to create social value for the customers, or target beneficiaries. The five criteria for assessing the social value potential of an idea are social need, mission alignment, achievable impact, social return on investment, and community support.

First, the idea must meet a true social need. This is a need that has been clearly identified as such. One way to determine the relevance of a perceived need is to survey the prospective target beneficiaries. Their response can help to determine whether or not to move forward with an idea. For example, one of our students had an idea for a social venture that would help to prepare economically disadvan- taged urban youth for college. She proposed to start her efforts in a particular neighborhood in New York City. She conducted a survey of a representative sample of high school students in that neighborhood. The response of the high school students was strongly supportive of this idea, which suggested to our student that her idea, if implemented, would be addressing a true social need. A word of caution is appropriate here, however. Target beneficiaries’ responses to anything that may be of benefit to them tend to be skewed to the positive. A more accurate determination of need in this case involved surveying high school teachers and administrators and college admissions officers as well.

Another way to determine customer need is to study the results of secondary research on the subject. Books, articles in academic and professional journals, and technical reports can all be sources of information on a given need. A prospective social entrepreneur who is assessing an idea for a system to address illiteracy in the rural United States could look at studies of literacy in rural communities or regions to determine how many people are affected by the problem, their attitudes toward learning to read, and efforts to date to address the issue.

Another measure of social potential is alignment with the social venture’s mission. This is probably most germane to social ventures that are already in opera- tion and are exploring new opportunities to pursue. The rule of thumb is that if an idea will not distract the venture from its mission (i.e., will not result in what is referred to as “mission creep”), it is worth exploring as an opportunity. If it will draw human, financial, and physical resources away from the mission, it should be approached with considerable caution.

Mission alignment for start-up social ventures works in the opposite direction. Once an idea is determined to be a genuine opportunity, a mission can be clearly articulated for a venture whose purpose is to pursue that opportunity (or fulfill the identified need). That is, a mission can be created that aligns with the initial opportunity. We discuss mission and the mission statement in more detail later in this chapter.

An idea for a social venture cannot be a viable opportunity if it will not yield an achievable impact. It must produce a transformation—a deep and lasting social

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56 Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies

change of some kind. This performance must be demonstrable in some way. It is not enough to say that it is your intention to end homelessness; you must be able to show that your efforts as a social entrepreneur can be directly linked to a lower rate of homelessness in your community and that the people you remove from the street do not return.

Obviously, there is no way to guarantee that an idea will have impact before it is pursued, but, at the least, there should be the ability to put a system in place to measure and report on progress toward the stated goal. There should also be a rea- sonable expectation that the idea, once implemented, can have a positive impact on fulfilling the identified need. Looking at comparable social entrepreneurship efforts with an eye to understanding how and why they did or did not succeed is one approach to determining the reasonableness of your own expectations relative to your idea. If, for example, the idea under consideration is a program for teaching obese children how to cook, using healthy ingredients, as a way to address the problem of childhood obesity in the United States, the prospective social entre- preneur will want to do some research on the impacts of other programs that address childhood obesity as well as the efficacy of cooking classes for children.

Going hand in hand with achievable impact as a criterion for social value potential is social return on investment (SROI). In business entrepreneurship, every investor in an enterprise expects a return on investment (ROI). That is, for each dollar they invest, they do so with the hope that they will receive more than a dollar in return. This is the incentive to invest. No investor in a business invests with the idea of breaking even or of losing money. The same should be true for social investments; they should “pay off” by producing social gains that exceed the value of the initial investment.

The difficult aspect of SROI is that, unlike ROI, it cannot always be measured in dollars. How does one accurately monetize lives saved or quality of lives improved? Nevertheless, there must be a return to the social investor, or the idea being assessed must be considered to lack an important element of social value. It is a major challenge for social entrepreneurs to demonstrate the return that their value propositions can produce, especially in advance of putting their ideas into action (Austin, 2006). Much thought has been, and continues to be, given to how to think about and measure SROI (Sawhill & Williamson, 2001; Campbell, 2003; Emerson & Bonini, 2004; Wei-Skillern, Austin, Leonard, & Stevenson, 2007). See Chapter 8 for a more detailed discussion of both measuring impact and SROI.

The final criterion for determining an idea’s social value potential is community support. A true social opportunity has the support of the community (however this term is defined) where it is being pursued. The community must believe in the idea philosophically, must believe in its ability to be effective, and must be willing to, at least, provide political support. This is because the community is a stakeholder in the opportunity in the sense that the social entrepreneur’s success in addressing the need will impact quality of life in the community. The social entrepreneur

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Recognizing Social Oppor tuni t ies 57

should research the history of the community’s support for similar social opportunities and may want to survey community leaders for their reactions to the idea under evaluation. Community resistance will, at best, make pursuing the idea difficult and, at worst, destroy the idea and divide the community. For example, an idea for addressing teen pregnancy through birth control is unlikely to receive support from a community where the majority of residents believe in abstinence for religious and ideological reasons.

Market Potential

The first criterion for determining the market potential of a social idea is its ability to address a customer need or want. As was noted earlier in this chapter, in business an important aspect of a viable opportunity is the ability of the product or service to add value to its customers by satisfying a need they have. This is no less true for a social opportunity. If the real need of the youth in a particular community is for better access to training for the skilled trades, a would-be social entrepreneur with an idea for helping these youth go to college does not have a genuine opportunity because she or he would not be meeting the needs of the intended customers.

Even meeting a customer need may not be enough if the customers do not want, or desire, the service being offered. In the case of the social entrepreneur with an idea for addressing childhood obesity through cooking classes for children, noted previously, there may be clear evidence that obesity among children in the community is a problem. Experts may agree that there is a need for viable ways to address this problem. The parents of obese children in the community may even agree that something should be done. However, if the children don’t want to attend cooking classes, or if their parents want to try managing their diets at home rather than sending them to cooking classes, the idea has failed this test.

This latter example raises another level of complexity in assessing this criterion. Who is the actual customer in this case? Is it the parents, who make the ultimate decision as to what is best for their child? Is it the child, who has a sense of what she or he likes or dislikes? The answer: the customers, in this case, include both the parent and the child. The child may be the one who directly benefits from the service, but the parent is an indirect beneficiary. Thus, both must need and want this service in order for it to represent a true social opportunity.

There have been too many instances of would-be social entrepreneurs attempt- ing to ride to the rescue of people who they perceived needed and wanted what they were offering, only to find that this was not the case. Just like a business person who tries to sell a product for which there are no customers, a social entrepreneur who does the same will soon be out of business.

An important concept in entrepreneurship is that of the window of opportunity. Every opportunity has one—a specific period of time in which conditions are ideal

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