What Do We Know About Nonprofit Entrepreneurs?: Results from a Large-Scale Survey
41 Pages Posted: 27 Dec 2016
Date Written: December 01, 2016
Abstract
While the academic fields of entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship have grown rapidly, nonprofit entrepreneurship has remained a minor field of inquiry, even though 50,000 nonprofits are started each year. Using a survey of 7,000 nonprofit founders, we provide baseline data on key dimensions of nonprofit entrepreneurship. We find that typical nonprofit entrepreneurs are distinct from for-profit entrepreneurs in several ways; they have bigger founding teams, are wealthier, older, more educated, and are less driven by self-employment. These differences inform a research agenda for the field. This study represents the first large-scale empirical analysis of entrepreneurship in the nonprofit sector.
Keywords: nonprofit entrepreneurship, nonprofit startups, social entrepreneurship
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