Non-Profit Organisation into Social Entrepreneurship - One Such Being PopTech
Around the world, visionary change agents are hard at work incubating new approaches to the planet’s toughest challenges. Yet they’re often doing so without taking advantage of the latest tools and thinking in technology, communications and innovation – or a network of experts, peers, and supporters who can help them truly change the world.
PopTech is a network of cross-disciplinary thinkers and doers with a creative problem solving and social innovation. Throughout the year, PopTech convenes actors from different fields to work together on significant challenges, and the community is anchored by their annual conference in Camden, Maine. One of the central questions in the growth of the field of social entrepreneurship is whether the term and framework of "social entrepreneurship" will persist, or whether we will look back and see it instead as an intellectual and organizational movement that influenced other fields without becoming one on its own. The annual PopTech conference in Camden, Maine suggests that the question might be a "both/and" rather than an "and/or".
Yet at the same time, what happens after the Fellows program ends shows why the social entrepreneurship field shouldn't shirk its overlap and potentials to integrate with the larger fields of business and science. Throughout the four days of the Maine conference, the Fellows give five minute presentations to the entire audience which ends up being some of the best content of the event. This sparks conversations and partnerships with senior execs at well established companies that simply wouldn't come from an event purely focused on social entrepreneurship.The lesson, I think, is that the field is young, but perhaps at the exciting moment where its beginning to have enough of sense of itself that it can interact with the larger fields that drive business and society, not with fear of assimilation but of excitement of mutual influence. This is a one-of-a-kind Fellows program designed for one-of-a-kind social innovators who have the talent, passion and potential to change the world.