Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature suggests CSR initiatives extend beyond meeting the immediate interests of stakeholders of for-profit enterprises, offering the potential to also enhance performance. Growing disillusionment of for-profit business models has drawn attention to social entrepreneurship and social innovation to ease social issues. Adopting a systematic review of relevant research, the article provides collective insights into research linking social innovation with social entrepreneurship, demonstrating growing interest in the area over the last decade. The past 5 years have seen a surge in attention with particular focus on the role of the entrepreneur, networks, systems, institutions, and cross-sectoral partnerships. Based on the findings of the review, the authors synthesize formerly dispersed fields of research into an analytical framework, signposting a "systems of innovation" approach for future studies of social innovation and social entrepreneurship.

The concept of the Anthropocene as a game-changer: a new context for social innovation and transformations to sustainability

“…Scholars in this field have sought to extend understandings of entrepreneurship that are focused on individuals and organizations creating novel solutions to social challenges (Mair and Marti 2009, Phills et al 2008, Dacin et al 2010, although not necessarily with an emphasis on whether or not the solutions they create have broad systemic impact. Progress has been made, within this approach, to (i) describe the diverse types of previous and existing "shared value" start-ups and organizational forms, such as hybridized business and nonprofit models around the world (Porter and Kramer 2011); (ii) to understand some of the tools used by social entrepreneurs to achieve success (e.g., Shaw andde Bruin 2013, Corner andHo 2010); whether and how these can be adopted within, or create a challenge to, existing business, nonprofit, and for-profit frameworks (Phillips et al 2015). However, few of these are specifically focused on social-ecological problem domains or explicitly on environmental sustainability, and those that do (e.g., Osburg and Schmidpeter 2013), are rarely focused on broad system transformation.…”

Capacity Building for Social Innovation: A Collective Impact Approach

“…As is evidenced in the literature (Hausmann, 2015;Heinze, Banaszak-Holl & Babiak, 2016;Phillips, Lee, Ghobadian, O'Regan & James, 2015), social entrepreneurship networks can provide tools to communities seeking to address economic and social issues. The structures inherent in such networks support interactions that provide the social mechanisms needed to lower the probability of failing and enable the knowledgeable actors to change structures, (Hausmann, 2015) thus facilitating transformational change.…”

Lights and Shadows of Business-Nonprofit Partnerships: The Role of Nonprofit Learning and Empowerment in this Ethical Puzzle

“…As our research focuses on relationships between two kinds of organizations, empowerment can involve the improvement of skills, resources, and authority of the less powerful partner, as well as holding partners accountable for outcomes of their actions, since BNPP can help social enterprises and nonprofits acquire and develop capabilities [25].…”