The list of top business entrepreneurs who are focusing either full time or a considerable amount of time on social entrepreneurship is highly impressive:

• Pierre Omidyar, founder of ebay, created Omidyar Network to "enable individual self-empowerment on a global scale."

• Jeff Skoll, cofounder of ebay, also runs Participant Productions, which makes socially conscious films including An Inconvenient Truth and Goodnight and Good Luck.

• Bill Gates has left Microsoft to pursue a full-time career in philanthropy.

• Warren Buffett recently donated $30 billion to the Gates Foundation.

• William Draper, one of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, created the Draper Richards Foundation to support social entrepreneurs.

• Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (Davos), founded the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

• Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, created Google.org, which supports social entrepreneurs and has raised over $1 billion.

• Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr is leading an effort to raise $100 million for microcredit loans