Digital Social Entrepreneurship: Theoretical Framework and Research Outlook

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship advocates solving social problems through market methods, and emphases the mixed logic drive and dual identity, which has contributed significantly to poverty reduction, environmental protection and sustainable social development. However, there are some problems with social entrepreneurship such as difficulty in transforming social opportunities, high cost of resource acquisition, difficulty in coordinating the interests of partners and difficulty in measuring social value, which need to be solved by innovation in opportunities, resources, governance, and value measurement. Digital technology has shaped the development of emerging industries and changes in social systems, and provided effective solutions for enriching social problem solutions, reducing the threshold for the integration of social resources, building a trust network, and measuring social influence. Digital social entrepreneurship, a new form of entrepreneurship to deal with the several challenges of the digital era, refers to the process oriented by solving social problems and satisfying the social demand that integrates digital technology with social entrepreneurship and promotes the digitization of social entrepreneurship opportunities, resources, governance and value measurement, so as to more effectively realize social entrepreneurship activities with mixed economic and social values. Through the comparative study with social entrepreneurship and digital entrepreneurship, digital social entrepreneurship has differences in opportunities, resources, governance methods and value measurement, which are manifested in the functions of outstanding characteristics of intelligent social problem connection, real-time response to social problems, visualization of social value, and indexation of social entrepreneurship. Hence, this paper preliminarily maps a research framework, which contains the connotation, process elements and operation mechanism of digital social entrepreneurship. The factors interact with each other to form a unique operating mechanism. Based on the case study of the “Xintairuan” which is a Chinese golden social enterprise, we have depicted the digital social entrepreneurship process including four basic elements, such as digital social entrepreneurs, digital social citizens, digital social entrepreneurship platforms and the digital social regulation. It forms the unique operation of mechanism of the artificial integration of opportunities-resources, the twinning of empowerment-regulation, mixed value of creation with joint efforts, and the scale of social influence. This article proposes the concept, elements and operating mechanism of digital social entrepreneurship in a novel way, describes the inherent commonalities between digital technology and social entrepreneurship, reconstructs the basic content of traditional entrepreneurship, and pays more attention to the initiative and dynamics of social entrepreneurial innovation processes under digital technology. It is also of great practical value to fill the gaps in digital social entrepreneurship research and improve efficiency. This paper holds that the nature of the operation process of digital social entrepreneurship is the process of social value creation by social entrepreneurs, participation of citizens in digital society from bottom to top and their active value dissemination, and promotion of value sharing and governance improvement by digital social entrepreneurship platforms. In the future, the research of digital social entrepreneurship urgently needs to construct a new paradigm of integration, contextualization, problematization and humanization under the vision of mixed value logic and digital drive. This study further develops the research’s connotation of digital entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, which has important practical meaning for promoting the digital application and the improvement of efficiency for social entrepreneurship.