Research on social entre­pre­neur­ship is final­ly catch­ing up to its rapid­ly grow­ing poten­tial. In The Search for Social Entre­pre­neur­ship, Paul Light explores this surge of inter­est to estab­lish the state of knowl­edge on this grow­ing phe­nom­e­non and sug­gest direc­tions for future research. Light begins by out­lin­ing the debate on how to define social entre­pre­neur­ship, a con­cept often cit­ed and laud­ed but not nec­es­sar­i­ly under­stood. A very ele­men­tal def­i­n­i­tion would note that it involves indi­vid­u­als, groups, net­works, or orga­ni­za­tions seek­ing sus­tain­able change via new ideas on how gov­ern­ments, non­prof­its, and busi­ness­es can address sig­nif­i­cant social prob­lems. That leaves plen­ty of gaps, how­ev­er, and with­out ade­quate agree­ment on what the term means, we can­not mea­sure it effec­tive­ly. The unsat­is­fy­ing results are apple-to-orange com­par­isons that make repli­ca­tion and fur­ther research dif­fi­cult. The sub­se­quent sec­tion exam­ines the four main com­po­nents of social entre­pre­neur­ship: ideas, oppor­tu­ni­ties, orga­ni­za­tions, and the entre­pre­neurs them­selves. The copi­ous infor­ma­tion avail­able about each has yet to be mined for lessons on mak­ing social entre­pre­neur­ship a suc­cess. The third sec­tion draws on Light’s orig­i­nal sur­vey research on 131 high-per­form­ing non­prof­its, explor­ing how they dif­fer across the four key com­po­nents. The fourth and final sec­tion offers rec­om­men­da­tions for future action and research in this bur­geon­ing field.