Social Entrepreneurship as Dynamic Innovation (Innovations Case Discussion: Freeplay Energy and Freeplay Foundation)

Abstract

ing and dynamic case of social innovation and entrepreneurship. We have observed the Freeplay business model grow and change over the past five years, since we began teaching this case study in courses on entrepreneurial strategies for social impact at IESE Business School in 2003. The case is an important one for several reasons. As a complex illustration of social innovation in practice, it helps us to understand the ways in which business and social goals can be both simultaneous and complementary. It generates insights for education and for the next generation of managers and entrepreneurs to adopt out-of-the-box thinking and to make the “social” in social entrepreneurship obsolete as entrepreneurship naturally comes to involve “social” opportunities. As a relatively new field of research, social entrepreneurship offers scholars a “source of explanation, prediction and delight”; a unique opportunity to rethink assumptions and concepts from different fields of management and social science research. Theorists working on social entrepreneurship will find that the Freeplay case helps us to identify key features of the phenomenon, each of them providing stimulating spaces for researchers, not only to contribute to emerging theory but also to enlighten and challenge our existing paradigms.