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Social Entrepreneurship:  Southwest Creations Collaborative

Emily Esterson of New West wrote a great article today about Southwest Creations Collaborative and founder/Executive Director Susan Matteucci.  (By the way, Flywheel is an investor in New West).

Susan is an outstanding example of a “social entrepreneur,” and if it seems a bit odd to write about social entrepreneurship on the Flywheel Ventures blog, it shouldn’t.  My partner at Flywheel, Kim Sanchez Rael, who is also a co-founder of Social Venture Partners New Mexico, likes to emphasize that we “can’t build world-class companies in mediocre communities.”  Social entrepreneurs are increasingly recognized as key contributors to building the world-class communities that we all want to live in, and which in turn attract other sorts of technology and commercial entrepreneurs and innovators.

Back when I worked with Tom Byers at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, we used to teach that entrepreneurship was a “way of thinking, leading, and managing” that was relevant in almost any organization, context, or domain.  In those days it was still considered somewhat heretical to teach entrepreneurship to science and engineering students in addition to MBA’s.  Increasingly, now, entrepreneurs are recognized for what they are:  creative individuals and teams who doggedly pursue opportunity and value creation regardless of the current constraints they face.  Nothing about that situation is unique to business, nor should it be.

Posted 10-17-2005, 07:14 pm, by Trevor Loy    Comments 0