Advancing a Contextualized, Community-Centric Understanding of Social Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Abstract

We investigate what distinguishes social entrepreneurial ecosystems (SEEs) from entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) through appreciation of the importance of context—the multiplex of intertwined social, spatial, temporal, historical, cultural, and political influences. Community is incorporated as a key variable and hitherto overlooked dimension of the structure and influence of SEEs. We draw on extant literature and examples of a variety of SEEs to support our propositions and demonstrate why considerations of both context and community are critical to advance understanding of SEEs. We contribute to the study of SEEs by presenting a new conceptual framework and theorizing SEE as an evolving composite of interdependent actors who interact and collaborate across multiple levels to collectively generate positive externalities and drive sustainable solutions to social problems.

How does the institutional environment influence the scaling process of social initiatives? An empirical exploration in the Dutch public sector

“…Third, our research highlights the importance of a dynamic perspective on institutional environments (Roy and Hazenberg, 2019;De Bruin et al, 2023). Changing societal frames, such as those derived from the Corona, encourage public and commercial organizations to join forces and overcome their negative perceptions of each other.…”

“…This makes it difficult to coordinate the scaling process (Cinar et al, 2019). Although collaboration between public and commercial organizations is becoming more common (Bryson et al, 2015;Sørensen and Torfing, 2009;De Bruin et al, 2023;Jukic et al, 2019), collaboration is still difficult (Rajala et al, 2021;Schot and Geels, 2010) as there are still many differences that hinder collaboration. Commercial organizations will have little interest in social initiatives that are difficult to turn into profitable concepts.…”

“…Homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. The academic literature on (public) innovation uses different terms to refer to the environment in which initiatives scale, such as context (Crisan et al., 2019 ), social system (Luhmann, 2020) or ecosystem (De Bruin et al., 2023 ; Cobben et al., 2022 ). Building on the public innovation literature, we focus on the institutional level as this is consistent with the public innovation literature, which typically expresses the environment as the “institutional environment” (Moore, 2013).…”

“…This makes it difficult to coordinate the scaling process (Cinar et al., 2019). Although collaboration between public and commercial organizations is becoming more common (Bryson et al., 2015; Sørensen and Torfing, 2009; De Bruin et al., 2023; Jukic et al. , 2019), collaboration is still difficult (Rajala et al.…”

The (R)evolution of the Social Entrepreneurship Concept: A Critical Historical Review

“…Notably, most quantitative research using more "inclusive" datasets, such as GEM, highlights that social entrepreneurship flourishes with public support. This highlights the potential for future research around social entrepreneurship "ecosystems" (de Bruin et al, 2022;Roundy, 2017;Roy & Hazenberg, 2019).…”