Tech for Good or Tech for Tech's Sake? Examining the Push for Technology in Social Entrepreneurship

By Dr. Elsie Tsui, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Management, CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong SAR.

Across the globe, governments are racing to harness artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technology. Singapore's National AI Strategy 2.0 committed over S$1 billion in late 2023, with a further S$1 billion under its National AI Research and Development (NAIRD) Plan in January 2026; the EU AI Act entered into force in August 2024 as the world's first comprehensive AI regulation; and Mainland China's New Generation AI Plan targets a RMB1 trillion AI industry by 2030. Hong Kong SAR is no exception, with its 2023 Policy Address and Smart City Blueprint 2.0 signalling aggressive intent to cement the city as a regional innovation hub.  Across Asia and the Pacific, this race towards technological innovation raises an important question for the social enterprise sector and for young founders trying to solve our most pressing social problems.

While technology's commercial benefits, including operational efficiency, data-driven decision-making, are well recognized, its translation to tangible social impact is more nuanced. Technology can undeniably bridge service gaps. RABI®, pioneered by Science and Technology for Autism Remediation (STAR) Limited under Professor Catherine So of The Chinese University of Hong Kong SAR, deploys socially assistive robots to deliver autism interventions in a predictable, low-stress, customizable environment, with curricula co-created with users and caregivers. Snaildy, founded by young social entrepreneurs, similarly improves the efficiency of special educational needs (SEN) support in schools. These cases show how digital tools can generate impact previously impossible.

Yet there are serious concerns. The first is the techno-solutionism trap. We must be wary of the belief that complex, deeply rooted social issues can be neatly resolved through technological fixes. Instead of grasping community needs, more young teams present "solutions in search of a problem", starting with generative AI, blockchain, or Internet of Things (IoT). This often produces superficial user research and a mismatch of product-market fit, where products are built for imagined beneficiaries rather than co-designed with real ones.

Second, uncritical adoption risks merging digital exclusion with the dehumanization of social services. A tech-first social enterprise may exclude the very people it aims to serve, creating an irony of "inclusive innovation" accessible only to the digitally fluent. Lau et al. (2025) found that only about 59% of older adults in Hong Kong SAR are digitally proficient, compared with over 90% of younger adults, with socio-economic status a key driver. Social work and community development are fundamentally relational fields where trust, empathy, and human presence matter; over-automation risks reducing vulnerable individuals to data points. This is compounded by automation bias, the tendency to trust algorithmic outputs over nuanced human judgement, which can erode the quality and empathy of care.

Third, there is the illusion of sustainability, both financial and environmental. Tech-heavy ventures require ongoing investment in servers, maintenance, and cybersecurity that young founders often underestimate. When initial grants run out, technology becomes an expensive liability, trapping founders in the "pilot trap" of impressive demos that never scale. The environmental cost is rarely interrogated either: Hong Kong SAR's grid remains roughly three-quarters fossil-fuel-powered, and the environmental cost of running data centres at scale is rarely interrogated or addressed in energy policy. Worse, if funding and recognition disproportionately flow to tech-enabled ventures, non-tech social enterprises doing the hard, relational, systemic work, such as community-based rehabilitation or employment integration, are starved of resources. This might potentially create a dangerous monoculture in the youth-entrepreneur pipeline, where everyone is incentivized to build apps to fulfil funders' priorities rather than address root causes.

This brings us to a critical provocation: are we, as an ecosystem — government, funders, educators, and judges — inadvertently rewarding technological sophistication over genuine social impact?

To foster a more thoughtful integration, we must move beyond rigid programme design and centre community agency. Communities affected by technology must have the power to shape, or refuse, it when it causes harm. Policymakers and funders must rebalance criteria so that depth of social insight and community engagement carry at least as much weight as technological novelty, while investing in foundational digital inclusion. Educators and accelerators should embed not just co-design but co-production,where affected communities hold sign-off authority over what gets built, and what does not, alongside tools like design thinking, before a single line of code is written. Ultimately, technology must remain a means, not an end. By funding foundational, user-centric research and celebrating low-tech solutions alongside high-tech ones, we can ensure innovation truly serves the public good rather than just itself.

About the Author

 Dr. Elsie Tsui is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Management at CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong SAR. Her work focuses on social innovation, technology for social good, and youth entrepreneurship ecosystems.