NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, November 8, 2019

We now live in an ever-changing world that demands everyone to be able to contribute to and adapt to change, i.e., to be a changemaker.

By Bill Drayton

Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning ‘a reason for being’, which is roughly translated to ‘thing that you live for’ in English. Each individual’s Ikigai is personal and specific to their lives, values and beliefs. A social entrepreneur’s Ikigai is to bring systems change and/or mindset change with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social, cultural, and environmental challenges. From deep within, he/she is committed to the good of all. They are ambitious and persistent — tackling major issues and offering new ideas for systems-level change. Moreover, social entrepreneurs are not trying to ‘capture a market’. They make their ideas as simple and as safe as possible so that people in thousands of different communities will seize the idea and become local change makers.

BE A CHANGEMAKER
We now live in an ever-changing world that demands everyone to be able to contribute to and adapt to change, i.e., to be a changemaker, to be able to participate and contribute. However, not every changemaker is a social entrepreneur. There are very few systems or mindset-change entrepreneurs. It’s 1.6 or 1.7 per 10 million population for the top social entrepreneurs. The social entrepreneurs need the local changemakers, who in turn need the role models and structuring that social entrepreneurs bring to initiate and make change possible. Another way of thinking of this is that the top social entrepreneurs constitute (imagine CEJs as the quintessential methodology here) as ‘the team’ of ultimately millions of teams as big ideas spread out across the world and trigger a wave of change.