Social entrepreneurship is missing where technology is built

The digital battle is already over

The tech world is going through a massive hangover.

The platforms that once embodied the promise of a more open and collaborative economy have revealed a very different reality: attention extraction, large-scale capture of personal data, distortions of competition, and, increasingly, direct impacts on democratic life. What was supposed to empower users has, in many cases, concentrated power.

For those who believed that technology could contribute to more inclusive and open societies, the moment is one of disillusionment. Not because the problems are new, but because they are now impossible to ignore.

This raises an uncomfortable question: was it avoidable? Were these platforms always bound to evolve in that direction, toward capital accumulation, market domination, and growing inequalities?

What makes this question particularly striking is that alternative models did exist. Some of the early experiments in collaborative and shared-use models did not come from venture-backed startups, but from the field of social entrepreneurship. Yet while Airbnb scaled globally, Couchsurfing did not.

The difference cannot be explained by product quality or timing alone. It reflects deeper asymmetries in access to capital, infrastructure, and strategic positioning.

If there is a lesson to be drawn from the past decade, it is not only that certain actors won. It is that others were not in a position to compete.

A blind spot in the making

Today, much of the debate still focuses on digital technologies. But the next transformations are already underway elsewhere: in fields such as robotics, synthetic biology, advanced materials or nanotechnologies. They are emerging from laboratories. The digital battle might be lost, however, the technological war is not. And the next battles are happening in laboratories.

This is where a structural blind spot appears.

Social entrepreneurship has grown significantly over the past decades. In France alone, the social and solidarity economy represents 14% of employment [1]. Yet its presence remains concentrated in sectors such as social services, education, culture, or finance. Technology-intensive domains, especially those rooted in advanced scientific research, remain largely outside its scope. In practice, the “tech for good” sector still looks at digital applications. Scientific research, as a space where future technologies are shaped, remains a very distant territory.

This absence matters.

There is a tendency to think of scientific and technological development as a linear process: discoveries are made, technologies emerge, and society adopts them. In this view, the role of social entrepreneurs is to use existing technology to achieve their social impact or to mitigate the effect of a bad technology.

This view is misleading. Technological trajectories are not autonomous. They are shaped by funding priorities, industrial strategies, regulatory environments, and institutional frameworks. Technology development largely depends on who is involved early on, which problems are considered worth solving, and which applications are pursued.

If certain actors are absent from these early stages, their ability to influence outcomes later on is limited. This is precisely what happened in the digital sector. And there is little reason to believe the pattern will be different in other technological domains. If social entrepreneurship aims to transform economic models and address systemic challenges, then leaving the production of technology largely untouched creates a significant limitation.

Where social entrepreneurship needs to be

Social entrepreneurship was not designed to adapt to existing systems. It was designed to change them.Yet when it comes to science and technology, it largely operates downstream: using existing tools, mitigating their effects, or reacting to their consequences.

Given the challenges posed by climate change and rising social inequalities, it is imperative that the places where the future is created, i.e. research laboratories, are more infused with the ways of social entrepreneurs.

If the time has come to rebuild our models of society and our economy according to new values in order to face societal challenges, as the actors of social entrepreneurship are striving to do, then scientific research and technological developments are a lever that must be seized upon.

If the places where future technologies are shaped remain outside its scope, then its ability to influence societal trajectories remains partial. Engaging with research is therefore not an option. It is a condition for relevance.

Again, let us be clear here: we are not talking about raising awareness, opposing some technological developments or educating scientists on specific social justice topics. We are talking about actually launching research partnerships to valorize research results, the same way companies and industrials are.

The question is therefore not whether social entrepreneurship should engage with science, but whether it can afford not to. If it does not, the risk is not simply to miss opportunities. It is to reproduce the same asymmetries that have already been observed: where a small number of actors define technological trajectories, and others are left to react to their consequences.

Early signs and open questions

This does not mean that no alternatives exist. Some organizations have started to build bridges between scientific research and social impact, experimenting with new forms of collaboration. I have seen these configurations emerge first-hand, sometimes through initiatives such as SoScience. Social enterprises that actually collaborate with research partners such as Leka, Alg&You, Nutriset, Sublime Energie and more, are becoming more and more common.

It is these partnerships between economic actors who wish to remain faithful to the values of social entrepreneurship and the world of advanced research that we need more of. The question of tomorrow's proteins for a sustainable food supply or robotics for social inclusion are only examples of the many scientific questions that we need to explore. Be it in nutrition, robotics, energy, agriculture, electronics : every field has its examples.

These initiatives remain limited in number, but they show that other configurations are possible. The question is whether they can scale.

And more importantly: whether the research and innovation system, as it is currently structured, allows them to.

This is the first part of a two-part series on social entrepreneurship and scientific research. The second article explores the structural barriers that limit these collaborations.

[1] according to a study conducted by ESS France (The French Chamber of Social and Solidarity Economy) and the National Observatory of the SSE.