1. What is the primary driver of the social entrepreneur?

The social entrepreneur is mainly drove by the aim of making the world a better place, providing services or solutions that will help to reach their purpose.

2. Should green or cleantech ventures be classified as social enterprises? If so, why?

I believe that Green or Cleantech ventures should be classified as social enterprises due to their aim to make the world environmentally cleaner at the same time taking advantage of it and making profits.

3. What are some of the negatives of forming the social venture as a nonprofit?

About the negatives aspects of forming the social venture as a nonprofit, I would like to highlight the difficulties at the time of setting up the venture, such as time consuming, expensive costs, legal aspects and taxes.

4. Why do stakeholders view the social venture differently from a traditional venture?

In my opinion this has to do with the point that social venture, gives the venture an added value since the main purpose it is not just making money but at the same time changing any issue to make the world better. This makes the stakeholder have another point of view for this kind of business that are socially involved with the environment.

5. What are some of the growth challenges of a social venture?

I think probably one of the important challenges is the employees, because they are the base of the venture, and there is no doubt that to reach the social purposes of the venture, you need employees aligned with the idea and with a strong commitment to make it work.

Another challenge I can find is at the time of fund raising, where you need to convince investor not only that your business plan works but also about your social idea, how is it going to make the world better or how is it going to convincethe rest of the people.

6. Differences between Social Entrepreneurship and CSR & Philonthropy

The first difference I can find is that CSR doesn’t need to be innovative as we learned a couple weeks ago that is one of the aspects of Entrepreneurship. The second one would be their respective purposes. In social entrepreneurship, the social mission has primacy and profits are means to reach this mission. it should, thus, be at least partly reinvested in the project rather than mainly appropriated by the shareholders. In corporations, however responsible, profit maximization remains the ultimate goal and is directed towards shareholder value appropriation.

In my opinion there is no right answer for this question, since it is a question that every entrepreneur face some day and only a few get a succesfull answer for it.

However, I am going to mention what for me are the key points for a succesfull business plan.  First of all, the business plan should be as accurate as possible, so that means been objective and brief at the same time without lacking the important details. Another relevant aspect to take care of is the research. Nowadays we have unlimited access to information, thats why plans with a good research are going to differ from the others. Another issue that entrepreneurs have to focus is the presentation of the plan, referring to comprehension, organization, well written and attractive. This is because a business plan is the way to convince or involve investors, bankers, customers or suppliers that your business it is better that the other competitor´s.

To conclude, this is not a magic formula, but at least I belive these are the factors a succesful business plan needs to have.

Why is innovation important and how it is changing?

Innovation is a very important issue that business have to take care of. This is a way to differentiate your business from your competitors and a good way to add value to your product or service provided.

Nowadays, as the communications has improved so much and we live in a globalize world where the markets and products are open to everyone, the competition in every business has increased exponentially and this is why innovation is such a relevant issue in the present.

If we look back in the past innovation would not have been such an important component of every business because the competition would not have been a worldwide competition which is really difficult to deal with. This is why I think innovation importance is growing exponentially with the year and all the technological improvements.

Why do you think DELL was successful when other companies trying the same model failed?

There is no doubt that DELL success has something to do with innovation. Something DELL did that allowed the company to take advantage from its competitors. This advantage was related to the way DELL design its Way-to-Order computers, so they let the customers design their own computers depending on their necessities. Being the first to provide this kind of product in the market would probably be the key point of DELL success.

First of all I would like to describe what does entrepreneurship means for me. I understand entrepreneurship as a process of organizing or managing a business in a daring way with an innovative point of view, and a lot of risk taking.

At this point, we can compare if this description matches with owning a small business. From my point of view we can say that there are plenty of small business owners which can be  classified as entrepreneurs. But on the other hand we have owners of other kinds of business as traditional business which also takes risks owning a small business but their ways of managing those activities are not focused on innovation. For example a traditional shoe maker who has being doing the same business for the last 30 years its not an entrepreneur, he might used to be 30 years ago but anymore.

To conclude,  this terms have lots of things in common and sometimes both go together, but there are differences between them.

Question 4: If you start a company, will you expect to always be in control, or will you be willing to share control with others if that will help the company grow and make all the participants wealthier?

In my opinion, from the very begining you can have the control of the company, but as soon as it starts to grow and become a larger institution you will need to delegate control in other people so the management will become more efficient and will let the company grow faster and in a better way. If you do not share control with others there will be a point where the company gets stocked in terms of growth.

Question 7: What are the growth issues entrepreneurial companies face?

In terms of growth, one of the most important issue is the decission of letting investors get into your company as stakeholders or not. This issue will really determinate how the company is going to grow. This same issue will also take place further on when the company is big enough and you have to decide if an IPO will help you company growth or it is worthless.

Another issue  I would like to mention is the location of the company. There is a moment when the growth expectations of the company starts to decrease because the location of the company does not allow it to keep growing. In this case you will have to face the problem if it is worth to change the location to a place with better growth expectations or it might have to many risks for the company or even may be start to expand the company to other places to keep growing.