Tackling our greatest social and environmental challenges starts with an intimate understanding of the challenges themselves. It requires understanding the complexity of the problems, including their causes and effects, as well as the system in which those problems are stuck. It also requires an understanding of what solutions are already being tried and the kinds of resources that could be brought to bear to shift the system and begin to tackle the challenge.
Unintentionally, our education systems often encourage students to jump too quickly into designing solutions without first giving students the tools to understand the problems. In many ways, this style of entrepreneurial education perpetuates a belief that individual organizations can scale to solve these challenges alone, and puts emphasis on the “heropreneur”, a term used by Daniela Papi-Thornton in her report titled “Tackling Heropreneurship“.