Emerging Social Entrepreneurship: Exploring the Development Process

Social entrepreneurs are change promoters in society; they pioneer innovation through the entrepreneurial quality of an innovative idea, their capacity-building aptitude, and their ability to demonstrate the quality of the idea and to measure social impacts (Perrini and Vurro, 2006). Drayton (2006) defines social entrepreneurs as men and women developing system-changing solutions that address the world’s most urgent social challenges. Valuable knowledge has been developed about how social entrepreneurs recognize opportunities in society and how intentions to start a social enterprise are formed (Mair and Noboa, 2006; Robinson, 2006). Others focused on the organizational aspects of the social enterprise and sought to identify patterns predicting or leading to successful social entrepreneurship (Alvord et al., 2004; Cramer, 2003; Desa and Kotha, 2006; Mulgan, 2006a). The social entrepreneurs of the cases explored in this study are citizens with an innovative idea for solving a social problem, but without an existing organization backing them. Research (Alvord et al., 2004; Bornstein, 2004; Meroni, 2007) shows that there are numerous examples of citizens developing social ventures and collaboration networks successfully. Studying these initiatives is important because they provide an opportunity; to learn from their common success factors and to be alerted to cross-cutting obstacles they encountered. It will help us to develop, initiate and test new policies, aimed at enabling and empowering individuals or ‘creative communities’ to do better and to do more. (Meroni, 2007: 5)