Defining the Vision of Social Ventures

Yesterday, I read an interesting article of one of my colleagues at Heinz College, Varun Arora, who writes in a blog about technologies for education and development, and who leads the start-up theopencurriculum.org. His point was that most of tech start-ups have become elitist. He defines this term as ventures that aim to benefit a really small % of society. He believes that, in spite of having great talents that can solve world issues, most of tech start-ups are focusing towards making profits indistinctly to the goal of the venture.

Although I agree with most of his arguments, I believe that this problem is also present in social ventures and is related to a lack of a clear vision of the company or venture. Which should be the definition of the vision of a social venture, the service it brings or the issue it lessens? Which is the value that a social venture creates, the product/service itself, or the mitigation of a social issue? I believe that the vision of social ventures should be built defining the future of the social issues, not the positioning of the social venture in the market.

Collin and Parras argue that a company’s lasting vision should include two components: a core ideology and an envisioned future. The first one is related to the values of the company, its purpose. Disney works through the imagination to make people happy. The second one is about having ambitious plans. Sony envisioned having world recognition for Japan’s products.

Based on this idea, I propose that social ventures should look to define its vision centered on the issue that they are confronting rather than the ideal market they will be serving. The core values should be directed to reduce poverty, hunger, among other issues. The envisioned future should be related to people, not the product or service. It means that social ventures should plan to position people in an upper quality level rather than positioning the venture in an upper level in the market.

The vision of social ventures is a key component of the success of them. Misunderstanding the purpose of the ventures, and confusing the core ideology with the envisioned future could create problems since the foundation of the start-up. Even more, in this case, we will be wasting talents and resources that could be directed to lessen world issues, and not just responding to particular interests.