Abstract
After achieving a dramatic economic recovery, Japan now has growing concerns about the future, particularly because of its aging society with falling birthrates and increased medical care expenses. However due to the fall in tax revenues, the government and the administration are finding such issues difficult to deal with. Under these circumstances, young people who tend to approach these social problems as social entrepreneurs have appeared. Therefore, it is also expected that at the other end of the age scale energetic senior citizens will become increasingly active as social entrepreneurs.
In this paper, investigating the characteristics of the behavior of social entrepreneurs, it has been discovered that there is a new type of leadership leading the present uncertain society in which many such social entrepreneurs, despite their lack of knowledge, experience and skills, seek to solve social problems that could not be solved by others. Such leadership is therefore significantly different from that characteristic of established organizations. In other words, when they encounter social problems, they regard them as their own problems not those of strangers. They seek to solve such problems driven by heartfelt motivation with a strong passion and sense of mission along the lines of if the country cannot solve this problem, it is up to me to do so. This has lead to the creation of a network type of leadership involving customers and collaborators. By contrast, since many of the seniors have worked in compliance with the rules under established organizations, and even though they have knowledge, experience, skills and willingness to work, they cannot readily work at the outset as social entrepreneurs. They must first strive to acquire creative leadership skills by themselves, and the society needs to prepare a mechanism to support this.
