Minnesota Public Radio conducted an interview today with Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, current Harvard Business School professor, and author of the recent book True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. In his remarks, George argued forcefully that, “the comparative advantage of the United States is in entrepreneurship and innovation”. He went on to advocate that, as the federal government determines its response to the financial crisis, it should focus on further strengthening these characteristics.

This reminded us of an intriguing blog entry that Nathaniel Whittemore of change.org wrote on the eve of the presidential election entitled “Barack Obama and the American Spirit of Social Entrepreneurship”. He reviews the history of s.e.:

We've just posted a new idea on Change.org's website. For those of you who don't know, there's a movement of citizens who are submitting ideas for how they think the Obama Administration should change America. It's called "Ideas for Change in America".

Our idea, based on our work with state partners in three states and the community we're building in other states and cities, is to "Develop a State-Based Strategy for a new White House Office of SE". You can read and vote for the idea by clicking on the following link. It takes less than two minutes to go through a quick sign-up process and vote:

http://www.change.org/ideas/view/develop_a_state-based_strategy_for_a_new_white_house_office_of_se. 

The top 3 ideas from the social entrepreneurship category will go on to the second round, and the top 10 in that second round will be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So your vote can play a critical role in helping our idea become official policy!

With less than 50 days until Election Day, the presidential candidates are working hard to point out their differences. By the tenor of this election, you’d never know there are issues on which the candidates actually agree! But there are, and policies that support the work of social entrepreneurs are among them.

For example, Senators McCain and Obama recently co-sponsored The Serve America Act of 2008, new legislation that recognizes the work of social entrepreneurs and includes several policy ideas that would foster and support social entrepreneurship.

The America Forward coalition is honored to partner with Root Cause and Public Innovators to present new ideas for ways social entrepreneurs and government can work together to solve our nation’s most pressing domestic challenges.  Together, we share the belief that matching social entrepreneurs’ innovative solutions with the policy and political reach of government has the potential to make a profound and lasting positive impact on communities across the nation.  

As we enter the general election season, social entrepreneurs have a unique opportunity to help shape and influence the next president’s approach to the non-profit sector. The next president will take office with ambitious goals to tackle our nation’s most serious social challenges, from health care reform to improving the quality of our nation’s schools. At the same time, he will be operating in a climate with limited tolerance for new government spending or government-only solutions. Given this, social entrepreneurs can offer the new president and his administration new, tested solutions to these challenges.