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Executive Summary
Poverty has caused tremendous difficulties all around the world, and numerous attempts have been made by governments, nongovernmental organizations, firms, and philanthropists to reduce the impact it has had on how people live. Recently, social entrepreneurship has been touted as having great promise for contributing to poverty alleviation, potentially accomplishing more to improve quality of lives than anything that could be done by large, bureaucratic organizations. Social entrepreneurs have adopted various “theories of change” for helping poverty alleviation and have pursued innovative initiatives in areas such as capital provision, business development assistance, improvement of education, resource matching, providing products for the poor, information provision, and health improvement. This essay cites examples of highly praised, social entrepreneurial programs in these areas, followed by a discussion of potential research contributions that could be made by academics interested in serving the needs of the programs. In particular, social entrepreneurs are seeking guidance from strategy research that could show them how they can be more effective at scaling their social impact, but they could also benefit from work done in areas such as cause marketing, social marketing, pricing, and franchising.

Biography
Paul N. Bloom is Adjunct Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and Marketing in the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where he serves as the center’s Marketing Faculty Director. He has had a long career doing research on how the field of marketing can contribute to societal welfare, holding professorial positions at the University of Maryland, the Marketing Science Institute, and the University of North Carolina. One of his articles won the award for the outstanding article published in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing for 1987 to 1991. His books include Knowledge Development in Marketing: The MSI Experience (Lexington Books, 1987) and the coedited Handbook of Marketing and Society (Sage Publications, 2001). He holds a PhD in Marketing from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and earned his MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His undergraduate degree is from Lehigh University.

Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2009
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