Social entrepreneurship competence: evidence from founders of social enterprises in Romania

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship has been defined until now by borrowing insights from commercial, Schumpeterian entrepreneurship as well as a new way of looking at non-profit work (Peredo and McLean, 2006; Short et al., 2009). Inspired by the use of a competence perspective to define entrepreneurship (European Commission, 2005), our main purpose in this article is to apply a competence perspective to social entrepreneurship, using a multidimensional framework. We start by looking at social entrepreneurship in the context of commercial entrepreneurship research. Next, we describe the concepts of competence and entrepreneurial competence as building blocks for our view. Then we describe the research of the concept of competence for social entrepreneurship among 103 founders of social enterprises in Romania. Our main findings suggest that social entrepreneurship competence is comprised of a large spectrum of social and functional competences (rather than cognitive competence) and motivation to solve social problems.