Students can now change the world with a computer and a healthy supply of junk food. We live in a time of exponential technological growth where people in our generation are the knowledge leaders. So, you may ask, “What has this got to do with student government?”  The answer is everything — and here’s why.

Talk to Travis Kieffer, a Stanford student who took a leave of absence this year to run the nonprofit Gumball Capital. Earlier in the year, he ran a marathon on every continent to raise funds for Gumball, and when I talked to him recently, he’d been coding for ten hours the day before and was working on expanding Gumball throughout the country. On a shoestring budget, Travis can potentially have global impact. Travis is one inspiring example of many.

So, let’s look at the question —  “Where have students had the largest positive impact on the world in recent times?” That’s a question Chip and Dan Heath would ask. In their recent book titled “Switch,” the idea is put forward that when you want to create a change, you should look around for the “bright spots,” where it’s working above and beyond expectations.

My personal belief is that a “bright spot” for student impact is through entrepreneurship, particularly when using technology. When you look at how a sophomore can start a company that reaches 500 million users (and growing) or how a couple of grad students can change the world with a search engine, and at the many other less famous examples, the answer is pretty clear: one of the most powerful vehicles for people of our age to change the world is through technology start-ups and social-entrepreneurship.

The issues tackled by many social entrepreneurship organizations are the same ones as those worked on by student government: e.g. Mark Goldenson’s Breakthrough.com works on mental health and wellness though online counseling technology, Kiva works on empowering others to do social good and cleantech start-up AmericanEfficient works on sustainability. What if student government were to become more entrepreneurial?

What do we mean by social entrepreneurship? Well, it’s not just about starting new ventures. Steve Jobs says that Apple is the “the biggest startup on the planet” and Google leadership still publicly states that it considers its organization to be a startup. Entrepreneurship is about a set of principles for decision-making and execution that have arisen from the pressure cooker of creating something new with no safety net. It’s a set of principles developed out of necessity that is made for making a difference as effectively as possible. To paraphrase Saul Alinsky’s comment on democracy, entrepreneurship is not an end, but the best means towards achieving these values.

How does student government become social entrepreneurship? You adopt the principles.

Here are three of these key principles in a nutshell. One: staying agile and reacting to changes. Two: refining your initiatives by finding out what people want, with an emphasis on data analysis. This principle can be shown by the burgeoning success of Hadoop and by techniques such as what Steve Blank calls the “Customer Development Methodology,” where the development of initiatives loops through trying something, testing it out with users, collecting feedback and refining the previous attempt. And three: using strategy and understanding your competitive advantage. These are just some of the principles of startups, and I firmly believe they’ll underlie the governance model of the future.

We are in Silicon Valley. We have some of the best minds and hearts on the planet here alongside our position as the world’s epicenter for technology innovation and entrepreneurship. Stanford is uniquely positioned with incredible infrastructure and resources to lead the way with this new model for the future. Bringing this together, the sky is the limit — and it tends toward infinity. Let’s do it.

Stewart Macgregor-Dennis ‘13