Collaborative Entrepreneurship: How Social Entrepreneurs Can Tip the World by Working in Global Teams

Abstract

archetypal that it is very hard for people to imagine anything different. However, this pattern is dying. It does not work. As the rate of change accelerates, and as change comes from ever more sources, the model of a few people sitting on top of everyone else doing repetitive tasks simply cannot cope. Nonetheless, it is still pervasive, still dominant—in how we are organized and in how we think. The new model is already here. It is a world where everyone is a changemaker, not just a tiny elite. You can see its principles at work in the world’s most successful organizations and regions—be it the Jesuits or Silicon Valley. This new world will be a global team of teams, teams that come together in varying combinations, scales and intensities as the need requires. The faster things change, the more the world will need this giant, fast-moving kaleidoscope of teams. A team is a team only when all its members are players; and in a world defined by escalating change, they can only be players if they can contribute to change. Social entrepreneurs are essential in this “everyone a changemaker” world. They conceive and engineer the basic new patterns. They are highly contagious role models encouraging many, many others to care and to organize. They are also mass recruiters of local changemakers—that is overwhelmingly how they spread their ideas. In their turn these local changemakers are role models and recruiters for yet more local changemakers, and a few of them will become the next generation of great entrepreneurs. Most important, social entrepreneurs are essential if this rapidly emerging world where all the basic systems are ever in flux is not to spin off in one ill direc-

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