That’s the finance part. But also, when you are looking for help for your vision and your endeavour as a social entrepreneur, you will find very little resources. I mean, it’s become better over the last couple of years, but it’s still very very difficult.

If you go to the normal organisations that aid start-ups, normally they won’t have heard about social entrepreneurship or they don’t know how to handle it.

And that’s especially because of one thing that makes social entrepreneurship so much different to conventional entrepreneurship. That’s impact, right? You have two models, you have your business model and you have your impact model. And that makes the whole building-of-your-start-up so much different.

We’ve talked from a systemic level about things that could be better for social entrepreneurs. We talked about sort of innovation resource support centres. We’ve talked about financing. I know that the government plays a big role in supporting social entrepreneurs coming up.  Where do you see the individual purpose-driven founders struggle the most? Especially in your work with social impact, I imagine you have a lot of contacts. What do you find are these recurring obstacles that founders fall into and how could they address those?

I think one of the biggest challenges that we are facing right now, and it’s one of those challenges that doesn’t make me sleep at night, is that we try to solve very, very, very difficult, complex problems that are very systemic. But the people that come to us have not even founded an organisation before. I don’t want to blame them because what they do is tremendous work. They are incredibly smart and brave and very humble.

But if we look at what lies ahead and what we have to solve, I mean look at the topic of plastics, right? Plastic packaging, you cannot solve it through one start-up alone and you cannot solve it by a team of university students that have recently graduated. And as I said, I love them. They are wonderful teams, but most of the time they need a year, sometimes two years, to understand themselves, their role as entrepreneurs, their problem, their solution and why their solution doesn’t work and how it could work, right? It takes a very long time and I think we are not on this meta level, if you talk about professionalisation of the ecosystem, then I think we do not do enough.

The problems that we are facing and that we are up against need a different approach and social entrepreneurship alone will not cut it.

It’s so interesting. You are the third German I’m talking to and you are the third German who says we’re not creating systemic change fast enough. I think in light of that perspective of “we’re not just trying to do a little bit, we’re thinking big!”, then I think it’s true that a team of three recent graduates, however innovative, courageous and humble as you said they are but in order to tackle systems that big, we have to step away from thinking of these single units and really think more about an ecosystem as you mentioned before. What are you most excited about in your field right now? Any developments or approaches? Any new actors? What are you seeing that gets you excited?

What gets me excited right now quite a lot is that the German government has picked up social entrepreneurship as a topic. Social entrepreneurship in Germany has been almost solely driven by these pioneer organisations. I mentioned some before, the BMW Foundation, the KFW foundation, SAP and some similar [organisations] like Haniel and Beisheim Stiftung. They have been supporting social entrepreneurship for almost 10 years now. As is in the nature of foundations or CSR departments, after a certain time, they change their vision or their mission, or people within these organisations change, right? So we see a big withdrawal in many cases of these organisations from the ecosystem. As we see this explosion of social entrepreneurship in Germany right now, we also see that many of the organisations that have been the first movers, that have funded the first movement, are drawing back. It will be very detrimental for the success of social entrepreneurship, the further success, to have the state on our side and to fund some of the endeavours that we have.

Can you think of two or three very specific tactics that you would like the German government to take to support social entrepreneurship? What’s the role of government?

There’s one, which I find funny, as well as my colleagues that I talk to, that when we go to actors within the state, and also others, but those are the important ones right now. If we go to them and tell them “We need funding for social entrepreneurship centres.”, they always say, “What? You need funding for those? Why don’t you put it on, you know, economically viable feet and do your thing,” and stuff like that. They always seem very dumbstruck when we tell them all of this start-up ecosystem, I mean the conventional start-up ecosystem and founders ecosystem in Germany, it’s all funded by the state.

It’s so funny that they say they don’t have to fund social entrepreneurship.

That’s one of the core things that I hope will make it into the draft [a proposal for a bill in the German parliament expected to be introduced this year] that they will hopefully bring out in the upcoming weeks.

The ecosystem, the organisations behind the social entrepreneurs that support the social entrepreneurs, that they get more backing. I mean of course financially, but also through networks and partnering and public procurement and all that.

I think that’s really important. Other than that, and I just said the word public procurement, I think it’s one of the biggest levers that we can pull for social entrepreneurs. If social enterprises can get contracts by the state, I think many of the things that the state wants to be provided with, social entrepreneurs or social enterprises can in some cases do even better than conventional enterprises. I think that’s two very strong things that the government could help us out with.

Absolutely. Last question, what resources or books do you recommend for emerging social entrepreneurs or even ecosystem builders who are stepping in, who want to step up their game?

One book that recently made it to the shelves is Lean Impact. It’s incredible. I loved this book. And I recommend it for everybody in the social impact sphere to read. Then of course, there’s this classic by Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer. It’s more about how systems work and how they are structured and how can you understand systems and stuff like that. It helps in every circumstance where you get in contact with systems and as a social entrepreneur you will do it undeniably. I mean, there’s just no way around it. Then of course I love the articles. I think it’s Kanya and Kramer in the SSIR, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, that speak about collective impact. Those are very, very good. You should have absolutely read Lean Start-up. I think that’s a given right? If you are a social entrepreneur, you should have read that because it is one of the tools that’s absolutely necessary as I see it.

Fantastic. Michael, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you sharing your insights from Germany with us, and keep up the good work.