Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is a segment within the entrepreneurial literature that focuses on entrepreneurs who use their entrepreneurial talents to achieve social and potentially financial gains to fund the social aspect from their endeavors. Researchers have characterized social entrepreneurship as a leadership position that requires an exceptional set of skills to produce innovative social results, which are difficult to measure from a market perspective (Dees, 1998). Owing to their creative process, these leaders may be able to find solutions to social problems which elude or confound typical experts in the respective social fields. They are not a replacement for current social endeavors by nonprofit organizations and government but are a critical complement which may be able to produce extraordinary results for the persons they seek to serve through the entrepreneurial process. Social entrepreneurs may also provide a critical balance to the dark side of entrepreneurial behavior which could produce negative effects for constituents through predatory or unethical behaviors in the pursuit of profit (Zahra and Wright, 2016). The personal mission of social entrepreneurs may stem from a need to make a difference in the world and to contribute to alleviating diverse issues such as hunger, poverty or other inequities in basic resources. A bibliometric analysis of research in social entrepreneurship showed that although the term came into being in 1964, it was only after 2003 that interest in studying this particular facet of entrepreneurship began to increase in popularity. Most of the research on this topic is found in western journals, but this could also be because not all non-English journals were included in the Web of Science (Rey-Marti et al., 2015). Quantitative research involving the global entrepreneurship model (GEM) studies found that countries with higher rates of entrepreneurship also had higher incidences of social entrepreneurship, and that countries with the highest rates of social entrepreneurship were also developed countries. This work confirmed that the social entrepreneur is a unique person with specialized skills and that, across countries and levels of economic development, social entrepreneurship may look different and be apparent in greater or lesser forms (Lepoutre et al., 2013).