Greening a Most Promising Entrepreneurs List

by Nathaniel Whittemore
At this point, it's hard to deny that "green" is a beast of an industry that has left the social entrepreneurship nest. Bloomberg Businessweek's annual "America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs" feature, however, displays the connection between the spaces as prominently as I've seen in major media coverage for some time. This is a trend I think we should encourage.

When I set out to write my "Top Moments of the Decade" in social entrepreneurship post last December, I faced an interesting question. What moment(s) in clean or green technology should I highlight as part of that list? As I started to think about it, I got less and less sure that it fit.

For one, the environmental movement predated at least the consolidated social entrepreneurship movement by years, so it felt a little weird to subsume its banner. Second, the intersection of the environmental movement and big business that has born the cleantech industry over the last decade is operating in such an independent space when it relates to social entrepreneurship that it hardly felt like part of the same thing. Ultimately, I opted to list Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" as an honorable mention, and shared some of these questions I had been having.

I've been thinking about that more and more lately, and wondering not only whether that was the right decision on my part, but moreover whether we as a field need to be even more proactive about linking the movements.

There is a language question that worries me. Right now, a lot of the movement around cleantech is that it's "good business." That's great, in the sense that it's no longer relegated to the margins of economic activity as charity. And it's good because ultimately, we need these technologies now, almost regardless of the motivation.

That said, saying something is "good business" is different than saying "we're going to shift our paradigm of what 'good business' has to mean." The shift in business language that I think we're going for is to say that good business means good for people beyond shareholders and good for the earth as well. From a branding standpoint, I think that triple-bottom-line thinking is what social entrepreneurship is good at provoking.

It's great to see, then, Businessweek's list of the most promising social entrepreneurs just bursting with people who are starting new green businesses. There are energy projects, sustainable food companies, material science companies using the earth's bounty (and mushrooms) in new ways, and more.

With any list like this, the specific sort of ranking tends to be less important to me than what the overall tone suggests about the space. It may not be a radical shift, but I'm still excited to the link between social entrepreneurship and green made clearer than ever.

Check out the full list here.
http://socialentrepreneurship.change.org/blog/view/greening_a_most_promising_entrepreneurs_list