Developing an interactive model of social entrepreneurship

Although social entrepreneurship is a topic receiving some attention in the literature, the scale and scope of concrete experiences in the field of ‘innovation in service of social change’ make this moment in time rich in learning and suggest that more research is needed to inform practice. This study investigates the content of contemporary understanding of social entrepreneurship and locates it within the extant body of research dealing with the relation between business and society, within entrepreneurial settings. In so doing we aim at developing a comprehensive conceptual framework for social entrepreneurship research. Specifically, we define SE as a dynamic process which strives to exploit innovation designed explicitly to deal with a complex social problem, resulting from the interactions among: (i) an individual dimension; (ii) an organizational dimension; (iii) an environmental dimension; (iv) a process dimension.