Audrey Chia is an associate professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, with a concurrent joint appointment at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. She is deputy chair of the Programme Management Committee of the MSc in Environmental Management, the University’s flagship sustainability program. Prof. Chia is also a senior fellow at the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation. Her research applies leadership, change, and innovation as theoretical foundations to address health, environmental, and social challenges. She has been an invited expert on social entrepreneurship, innovative philanthropy, innovative financing, and sustainable development in meetings of the United Nations, Asian Development Bank, OECD, and the Asia-Pacific Leaders’ Malaria Alliance. She also serves on the Management Committee of the United Nations Global Compact Network Singapore. She regularly judges venture competitions worldwide and consults public, private, nonprofit, and multilateral organizations on leadership and change.
Conversations about entrepreneurship often center on unicorns, venture capital, and disruptive innovation. However, this arguably narrow view overlooks a tradition of entrepreneurship that is driven by social purpose rather than profit. To reimagine entrepreneurship, it might be fun and instructive to take inspiration from social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship is the practice of addressing social problems by applying principles, methods, or models drawn from business or entrepreneurship. In our 2016 paper “Social Entrepreneurship: Improving Global Health,” published in JAMA, Prof. Yee Wei Lim and I identified several characteristics of social entrepreneurship:
Primacy of social purpose, focusing on addressing social and environmental problems faced by the disadvantaged, poor, and underserved
Application of entrepreneurial approaches to develop self-sustaining models
Innovation or borrowing ideas and solutions across disciplines and sectors
Partnership co-design with local communities
Focusing on the three “A”s: affordability, availability, and access.[i]
Turning our attention to social entrepreneurship, we shift our focus away from unicorns, Silicon Valley, and the venture capital ecosystem. Social entrepreneurs often operate in resource-poor or resource-constrained environments. Social entrepreneurship challenges the conventional notion of entrepreneurship by posing and providing alternative answers to these questions:
What is the purpose of entrepreneurship?
Who do entrepreneurs serve? Who benefits from entrepreneurship?
What is entrepreneurship?
Who can be an entrepreneur?
These questions lead us to understand that one does not need to study entrepreneurship to become an entrepreneur. In our university programs on entrepreneurship, then, how much attention is given to small and medium enterprises? What attention, if any, is given to social entrepreneurship? These questions can provide a good starting point for reimagining entrepreneurship.
What is the purpose of entrepreneurship?
Social entrepreneurs are motivated by addressing social problems, using or applying ideas from business and conventional entrepreneurship.
Jack Sim founded World Toilet Organization to draw attention to the plight of the 2.4 billion people lacking access to sanitation.[ii] His advocacy methods drew upon principles of marketing, humor, stakeholder engagement, and strategies. Sim mobilized a range of actors, ranging from companies such as Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever to religious leaders, community leaders, governments, and the public, to advocate for better sanitation, build more toilets, and provide education on health and sanitation management. For social entrepreneurs like Sim, the primary purpose is driven by a social cause rather than profit. This is an example of nonprofit social entrepreneurship.
Business entrepreneurs have often started with the dual purpose of earning revenue while meeting social needs. William Lever, for example, made an affordable soap (Lifebuoy) to help fight the spread of cholera in Victorian England. Bridgestone‘s founder started by selling tabi (Japanese socks), then rubber-soled straw sandals, before moving to manufacturing tires. As we reimagine entrepreneurship, it is worth asking what entrepreneurship is for and what its purpose is or should be.
Who do entrepreneurs serve?
Social entrepreneurship is deliberately designed to meet the needs of disadvantaged and underserved communities. Social entrepreneurial solutions are often designed around the three As: affordability, accessibility, and availability.
Dr. Devi Shetty’s Narayana Health exemplifies this service-oriented entrepreneurship. He believes, “if it is not affordable, it is not a solution.” Guided by this, Narayana Health provides multispecialty healthcare for all, especially low-income patients. Through task-shifting, waste management, economies of scale, application of IT to improve operations, and the introduction of a microinsurance plan, the cost of surgeries can be considerably reduced: US$1200 for a heart surgery, US$2000 for a heart bypass, and US$700 for cancer surgery.[iii]
What is entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship is not always about creating a new product or service. Many entrepreneurs seek to deliver solutions rather than invent them.
Tomo Hamakawa and Ewa Wojkowska founded Kopernik in Indonesia to deliver low-cost, life-changing technologies to communities at the last mile.[iv] They created an online marketplace where nongovernmental organizations and communities could list their requests and potential funders could discover and provide these items, such as water filters, clean birth kits, and portable solar lamps. Kopernik’s entrepreneurial contribution in its first phase was not in inventing a new product but in providing a delivery solution, bridging gaps in information, access, and availability. While we recognize the importance of innovations in entrepreneurship, it is equally important that entrepreneurship also addresses how those innovations can reach and benefit a larger number of people. There is value in entrepreneurship that focuses on extending the positive social impact of innovations, enhancing equity and sustainable development.
Subsequently, Kopernik built capacity among local women in villages to distribute and service or maintain items, such as clean cookstoves. Kopernik now operates like a sustainable development lab; it creates applied research projects and experiments with the local community to develop better solutions to address social and environmental problems. For example, some projects address waste management, agricultural produce storage, sustainable farming, and disaster resilience. This practice of co-designing solutions and including beneficiaries as part of the solution is at the heart of social entrepreneurship.
Who can be an entrepreneur?
Social entrepreneurs come from all walks of life, and many of them have not attended any entrepreneurship courses. Arunachalam Muruganantham, India’s “Menstrual Man,” invented a machine to produce low-cost sanitary pads to address period poverty in India. In one of his public talks, he shared the barriers and stigma he faced while trying to develop his solution, and observed, “Because I’m uneducated, I kept going. If you were educated, what would happen? You’d stop.”
Others bring formal expertise to social enterprise. Biotechnologist Dr. Eddy Agbo invented a spot malaria test kit for parents in remote parts of Africa to quickly detect malaria in their children by using a simple urine-based dipstick technology. With this text kit, they prevented the need for parents to walk for over an hour with their febrile children to a health facility.[v] Anant Kumar worked at Hindustan Latex before founding a chain of low-cost, high-quality maternity hospitals for the population just above the poverty line in India. With his wife Priya Anant, he later founded Life Circle Health Services to provide affordable home care for older people whose family members worked full-time or lived far away.[vi] After completing their master’s degrees in business and information technology, respectively, Abhinav and Shrutika Girdhar founded Bodhi Health Education and Bodhi Labs to provide mobile, online, modular training for health workers in rural areas.[vii] These examples and my own experience with social entrepreneurs suggest that anyone can be a social entrepreneur, regardless of their educational level or socioeconomic status.
Social entrepreneurship, whether nonprofit or for profit, aims to create sustainable models to meet the needs of disadvantaged and underserved communities. It can be high-tech or low-tech, but its characteristic is its social purpose. Entrepreneurship and innovation can be reimagined with a focus on social benefit, affordability, access and availability. Social entrepreneurship is an expression of community-based entrepreneurship that deserves more attention and interest.
[i] Yee Wei Lim and Audrey Chia, “Social Entrepreneurship: Improving Global Health,” JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association 315, no. 22 (2016): 2393-2394; see also Audrey Chia et al., “Social Entrepreneurship in Obesity Prevention: A Scoping Review,” Obesity Reviews 23 no. 3 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.13378; Audrey Chia and Yee Wei Lim, “Social Innovators Leading Change in Health,” In On the Emergence and Understanding of Asian Global Leadership, ed. David De Cremer (De Gruyter, 2021), 57-64.
Global Innovation Reimagined showcases reflections and research on innovation in its many forms across Asia, North America, and Europe. The perspectives offered herein draw from discussions during the trilateral Reimagining Entrepreneurship and Innovation conference, hosted by CAPRI, CAPRI USA, the University of Virginia, and Copenhagen Business School from July 22 to 25, 2025.
Siwei Huang discusses how Taiwan’s “sovereign AI” vision is running on fragile energy foundations. In a period defined by geopolitical competition and energy uncertainty, Taiwan needs to strengthen its energy resilience to advance digital sovereignty and technological power.
Reimagining Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Social Entrepreneurs
Author
Audrey Chia
National University of Singapore
Biography
Audrey Chia is an associate professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, with a concurrent joint appointment at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. She is deputy chair of the Programme Management Committee of the MSc in Environmental Management, the University’s flagship sustainability program. Prof. Chia is also a senior fellow at the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation. Her research applies leadership, change, and innovation as theoretical foundations to address health, environmental, and social challenges. She has been an invited expert on social entrepreneurship, innovative philanthropy, innovative financing, and sustainable development in meetings of the United Nations, Asian Development Bank, OECD, and the Asia-Pacific Leaders’ Malaria Alliance. She also serves on the Management Committee of the United Nations Global Compact Network Singapore. She regularly judges venture competitions worldwide and consults public, private, nonprofit, and multilateral organizations on leadership and change.
Conversations about entrepreneurship often center on unicorns, venture capital, and disruptive innovation. However, this arguably narrow view overlooks a tradition of entrepreneurship that is driven by social purpose rather than profit. To reimagine entrepreneurship, it might be fun and instructive to take inspiration from social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship is the practice of addressing social problems by applying principles, methods, or models drawn from business or entrepreneurship. In our 2016 paper “Social Entrepreneurship: Improving Global Health,” published in JAMA, Prof. Yee Wei Lim and I identified several characteristics of social entrepreneurship:
Turning our attention to social entrepreneurship, we shift our focus away from unicorns, Silicon Valley, and the venture capital ecosystem. Social entrepreneurs often operate in resource-poor or resource-constrained environments. Social entrepreneurship challenges the conventional notion of entrepreneurship by posing and providing alternative answers to these questions:
These questions lead us to understand that one does not need to study entrepreneurship to become an entrepreneur. In our university programs on entrepreneurship, then, how much attention is given to small and medium enterprises? What attention, if any, is given to social entrepreneurship? These questions can provide a good starting point for reimagining entrepreneurship.
What is the purpose of entrepreneurship?
Social entrepreneurs are motivated by addressing social problems, using or applying ideas from business and conventional entrepreneurship.
Jack Sim founded World Toilet Organization to draw attention to the plight of the 2.4 billion people lacking access to sanitation.[ii] His advocacy methods drew upon principles of marketing, humor, stakeholder engagement, and strategies. Sim mobilized a range of actors, ranging from companies such as Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever to religious leaders, community leaders, governments, and the public, to advocate for better sanitation, build more toilets, and provide education on health and sanitation management. For social entrepreneurs like Sim, the primary purpose is driven by a social cause rather than profit. This is an example of nonprofit social entrepreneurship.
Business entrepreneurs have often started with the dual purpose of earning revenue while meeting social needs. William Lever, for example, made an affordable soap (Lifebuoy) to help fight the spread of cholera in Victorian England. Bridgestone‘s founder started by selling tabi (Japanese socks), then rubber-soled straw sandals, before moving to manufacturing tires. As we reimagine entrepreneurship, it is worth asking what entrepreneurship is for and what its purpose is or should be.
Who do entrepreneurs serve?
Social entrepreneurship is deliberately designed to meet the needs of disadvantaged and underserved communities. Social entrepreneurial solutions are often designed around the three As: affordability, accessibility, and availability.
Dr. Devi Shetty’s Narayana Health exemplifies this service-oriented entrepreneurship. He believes, “if it is not affordable, it is not a solution.” Guided by this, Narayana Health provides multispecialty healthcare for all, especially low-income patients. Through task-shifting, waste management, economies of scale, application of IT to improve operations, and the introduction of a microinsurance plan, the cost of surgeries can be considerably reduced: US$1200 for a heart surgery, US$2000 for a heart bypass, and US$700 for cancer surgery.[iii]
What is entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship is not always about creating a new product or service. Many entrepreneurs seek to deliver solutions rather than invent them.
Tomo Hamakawa and Ewa Wojkowska founded Kopernik in Indonesia to deliver low-cost, life-changing technologies to communities at the last mile.[iv] They created an online marketplace where nongovernmental organizations and communities could list their requests and potential funders could discover and provide these items, such as water filters, clean birth kits, and portable solar lamps. Kopernik’s entrepreneurial contribution in its first phase was not in inventing a new product but in providing a delivery solution, bridging gaps in information, access, and availability. While we recognize the importance of innovations in entrepreneurship, it is equally important that entrepreneurship also addresses how those innovations can reach and benefit a larger number of people. There is value in entrepreneurship that focuses on extending the positive social impact of innovations, enhancing equity and sustainable development.
Subsequently, Kopernik built capacity among local women in villages to distribute and service or maintain items, such as clean cookstoves. Kopernik now operates like a sustainable development lab; it creates applied research projects and experiments with the local community to develop better solutions to address social and environmental problems. For example, some projects address waste management, agricultural produce storage, sustainable farming, and disaster resilience. This practice of co-designing solutions and including beneficiaries as part of the solution is at the heart of social entrepreneurship.
Who can be an entrepreneur?
Social entrepreneurs come from all walks of life, and many of them have not attended any entrepreneurship courses. Arunachalam Muruganantham, India’s “Menstrual Man,” invented a machine to produce low-cost sanitary pads to address period poverty in India. In one of his public talks, he shared the barriers and stigma he faced while trying to develop his solution, and observed, “Because I’m uneducated, I kept going. If you were educated, what would happen? You’d stop.”
Others bring formal expertise to social enterprise. Biotechnologist Dr. Eddy Agbo invented a spot malaria test kit for parents in remote parts of Africa to quickly detect malaria in their children by using a simple urine-based dipstick technology. With this text kit, they prevented the need for parents to walk for over an hour with their febrile children to a health facility.[v] Anant Kumar worked at Hindustan Latex before founding a chain of low-cost, high-quality maternity hospitals for the population just above the poverty line in India. With his wife Priya Anant, he later founded Life Circle Health Services to provide affordable home care for older people whose family members worked full-time or lived far away.[vi] After completing their master’s degrees in business and information technology, respectively, Abhinav and Shrutika Girdhar founded Bodhi Health Education and Bodhi Labs to provide mobile, online, modular training for health workers in rural areas.[vii] These examples and my own experience with social entrepreneurs suggest that anyone can be a social entrepreneur, regardless of their educational level or socioeconomic status.
Social entrepreneurship, whether nonprofit or for profit, aims to create sustainable models to meet the needs of disadvantaged and underserved communities. It can be high-tech or low-tech, but its characteristic is its social purpose. Entrepreneurship and innovation can be reimagined with a focus on social benefit, affordability, access and availability. Social entrepreneurship is an expression of community-based entrepreneurship that deserves more attention and interest.
[i] Yee Wei Lim and Audrey Chia, “Social Entrepreneurship: Improving Global Health,” JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association 315, no. 22 (2016): 2393-2394; see also Audrey Chia et al., “Social Entrepreneurship in Obesity Prevention: A Scoping Review,” Obesity Reviews 23 no. 3 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.13378; Audrey Chia and Yee Wei Lim, “Social Innovators Leading Change in Health,” In On the Emergence and Understanding of Asian Global Leadership, ed. David De Cremer (De Gruyter, 2021), 57-64.
[ii] Salomé Grouard, “Entrepreneur Jack Sim talks about ‘making bathroom talk sexy’ and why the lack of access to toilets endangers women,” Tatler Asia, November 19, 2024, https://www.tatlerasia.com/power-purpose/impact/jack-sim-sanitation-issues-health-hygiene-interview.
[iii] Dheeraj Jayakumar et al., “Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty: The Visionary Cardiothoracic Surgeon Who Championed Affordable Healthcare,” Cureus 16 (10) October 2, 2024,https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11530259/.
[iv] Eva Wojkowska, “Looking Back and Moving Forward: The Evolution of Kopernik,” Kopernik, January 17, 2018, https://kopernik.info/en/news-events/news/looking-back-and-moving-forward-the-evolution-of-kopernik.
[v] Omono Okonkwo, “INTERVIEW: How I developed Urine Malaria Test — Nigerian inventor,” Premium Times, July 21, 2016, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/features-and-interviews/207296-interview-i-developed-urine-malaria-test-nigerian-inventor.html?tztc=1.
[vi] Moinak Mitra, “Pathbreakers: LifeSpring, a high-quality, low-cost maternity hospital is a viable business model,” The Economic Times, March 8, 2012, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/pathbreakers-lifespring-a-high-quality-low-cost-maternity-hospital-is-a-viable-business-model/articleshow/12186593.cms; Manish Gupta et al., “Stay or Move On? Life Circle’s Unique Challenge,” Emerging Economies Cases Journal, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/25166042251358602.
[vii] “The Largest Professional Learning And Development Platform For The Healthcare Industry,” The CEO Magazine, 2019, https://www.theceo.in/startups/the-largest-professional-learning-and-development-platform-for-the-healthcare-industry.
Global Innovation Reimagined
Global Innovation Reimagined showcases reflections and research on innovation in its many forms across Asia, North America, and Europe. The perspectives offered herein draw from discussions during the trilateral Reimagining Entrepreneurship and Innovation conference, hosted by CAPRI, CAPRI USA, the University of Virginia, and Copenhagen Business School from July 22 to 25, 2025.
About the Author
Audrey Chia
More
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