Social Entrepreneurship for SME Development: Insights from Three Decades of Third Sector Research
1 Pages Posted: 13 Oct 2016
Date Written: October 13, 2016
Abstract
In contemporary schools of business an increasing number of programs have launched courses in Social Entrepreneurship. In addition, numerous non-academic actors like the Skoll Foundation and the Ashoka fellows program have actively promoted social entrepreneurship as an idea made for its time. The courses and supporting initiatives share in common a belief that a new organizational form and associated social ethic is required to resolve social challenges at the undeveloped interspace between private interest and social good. A surprising feature of the business school interest in social entrepreneurship it the apparent disinterest in lessons learned from earlier efforts to inhabit this indeterminate and undefined place between private and public. Most of these lessons reside in a large and diverse body of literature best captured by the term “third sector” research. It is the purpose of this paper to address two questions. First, how does the literature on the broad array of “third sector” organizational forms contribute to the framing of entrepreneurial opportunity? And second, should social entrepreneurship efforts evolve into a significant economic sector, what HR System designs will be required to support this new organizational form?
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