Making the way we live more agreeable

Tim Smit wants people to be free to take risks and improve the world around them, writes COLM KEENA

TIM SMIT, chief executive and co-founder of the Eden Project in Cornwall, believes the emphasis in “social entrepreneur” should rest on the second of the two words.

For him, many people view the concept of a social entrepreneur as a “wishy-washy” idea, where the rigour of the private sector is married with the citizenship values of the public sector. However, entrepreneurism is a very specific state of mind, according to Smit, and it is this aspect of the concept on which he most focuses.

Smit’s curriculum vitae certainly is certainly that of an entrepreneurial spirit. A graduate in anthropology and archaeology, he worked as an archaeologist for a short time after leaving college before becoming involved in the music industry.

He wrote music and produced and scored a number of hit albums – among those with whom he worked with Barry Manilow and the Nolan Sisters. However, after a few years it was time to move on.

In 1987, he and his family moved to Cornwall where, with some others, he became involved in the restoration of the gardens in the Heligan Estate. The restoration of the gardens was the subject of a six-part TV series and a book by Smit and has been a great and ongoing success.

After this he moved on to the Eden Project, which involved creating the two largest glasshouses in the world. The two transparent biomes were built in an old china clay pit near the village of Bodelva. The biomes contain different eco-climates, rainforest and Mediterranean, and the centre is close to having had 13 million visitors.

It will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year, on St Patrick’s Day. “We opened on St Patrick’s Day because of the Irish people who worked on the project.”

The centre cost £140 million to build and Smit and his colleagues sourced half the money from the UK lottery. More came from Europe, a regional development agency, donations from charitable trusts and a bank loan of £23 million.

While the project has an annual turnover of about £20 million, its contribution to the Cornish economy has estimated to be in the region of £1 billion. It is owned by a trust and is a registered charity.

A standard business plan for the project would have caused any bank to to refuse to fund it, says Smit, but seen from the perspective of its effect on Cornwall, the project is a huge success. Smit believes social entrepreneurism is potentially one of the most important structural possibilities that has arisen in the history of capitalism.

“Many people who run private and public limited companies feel a disquiet at the distance between the shareholder and the company.”

Part of the difficulty arises when companies are in turn owned by other companies, with the directors in all of them having a legal duty to maximise profits for their shareholders. This can lead to a “breach of the moral contract” between shareholder and company.

“A lot of people feel there is space for a new form of corporate structure that can take account of words such as stakeholders alongside shareholders.” He believes people are yearning for a structure where companies can optimise rather than maximise profits.

Asked about motive, he says able people can get involved in social entrepreneurship out of a desire for “craic” and a desire to make money. “It drives me nuts that some people believe social entrepreneurs should not make money. The issue is the proportion of profit that is taken out. There is no shame in making a good profit out of a company that is being well run.”

For himself, he believes he has been motivated by a desire to do something before dying as well as the desire to know he had done something well.

There is also the benefit though of getting to work with people who are interesting. “You feel very alive. Most of the people who excite me are not anti-capitalist – they are commercial, but also they are driven by a belief that they are living in a period in history that is important. I feel that.”

For Smit the world is at a crossroads, facing enormous challenges. “The question is if we can rise to the challenges or whether we are going to be like poor lambs to the slaughter because we haven’t got the internal intellect or energy to fight and to change certain things to make our own lives, but also the way we live on the planet more agreeable.”

His work with Eden and with other public good activities in the UK brings him into frequent contact with the public sector there. He says it frustrates him to see people who in a different structure might have made a greater contribution to society, having to operate in a structure that prevents them having any “agency” over anything whatsoever.

He believes the drive for good governance can lead to so many rules that people end up not being allowed to do anything. Teachers cannot alter the curriculum, judges are told what sentences they are allowed to hand down. “No one is being asked to be responsible for anything.”

Liberating people so that they can take risks and seek to improve the world around them involves the risk that some efforts might not work out, but that is a risk people should be allowed to take, says Smit.

Tim Smit, social entrepreneur and founder of the Eden Project, is the guest speaker at the Social Entrepreneurs Ireland 2010 Awards in Dublin on October 1st.