A new survey commissioned by UnLtd has found that if they had access to the right support about 1 in 3 people would like to be social entrepreneurs.

This is yet another confirmation of Dr Rebecca Harding's research on the numbers social entrepreneurs.  Her figures suggested some time ago that there are over 230,000 'hidden social enterprises' in the UK, and that over a third of all new entrepreneurs would like to be social entrepreneurs.

It is also another confirmation of the staggering scale of the opportunity we have - and this to me is the area where we really lack leadership (not, as Liam Black recently thought, in defending existing social enterprises).

Our focus on a few kinds of social enterprise - those that happen to fit an official definition, or can be used to forward a government agenda - is blinding us to a much bigger picture.

I've also previously mentioned in my blogs here and in the Guardian Online the Third Sector Research Centre papers on measuring the scale of UK social enterprise (September 2010) and on the construction of the 'social enterprise' concept (forthcoming).  These should have exploded once and for all the myth that there are only 62,000 social enterprises in the UK - yet I still hear this discredited figure trotted out by people who are supposed to be promoting social enterprise!

Nobody knows how many 'social enterprises' there really are because surveys have been shaped around competing definitions of 'social enterprise', so the numbers they come up with are, in fact, politically constructed.  My own view, looking at the analysis, and including Rebecca Harding's 'hidden social enterprises', is that there are probably at least a third of a million people and organisations out there using business models and methods to achieve their social mission.

We need to reach out to them, and to all new entrepreneurs, by seeing ourselves as - and becoming - a dynamic and welcoming and flexible and outward-looking movement, rather than a defensive, static, walled-in 'sector'.