Abstract
As social problems become more extensive and diverse, one of the most critical capabilities of social entrepreneurs is connecting and aligning various stakeholders. Social entrepreneurs can solve problems better through collaboration with stakeholders, and this leads to sustainable innovation of society. Accordingly, social entrepreneurship education (SEE) programs should be designed and operated to cultivate social entrepreneurs’ abilities to enhance connectivity with all relevant entities of the social enterprise ecosystem. Consequently, SEE can form ever-growing communities of social entrepreneurs while functioning as innovation hubs for entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) evolving on their own. To this end, this study proposes a design and assessment framework for SEE. The framework emphasizes strengthening internal connectivity among SEE program members and external connectivity with outside entities, including universities, firms, government agencies, civil societies, and natural environments. This framework clarifies how and to whom social entrepreneurs should connect throughout the SEE process. This paper analyzes the case of an MBA degree SEE program in Korea using this framework and identifies directions for further improvement of SEE, contributing to the social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education literatures by integrating SEE’s key features with social theories of learning and the quintuple helix model for sustainable innovation ecosystems. Practically, our findings provide a useful benchmark to find isolated internal and external entities that need more active interactions to achieve SEE’s purposes.
Highlights
Social enterprises have been noteworthy as a key solution to a variety of social problems within current market economy systems [1]
In order to design this conceptual framework, this paper builds upon two theoretical bases from previous studies: social theories of learning, which emphasize the importance of communities of practice, and the quintuple helix model (QHM), which defines the components of a sustainable innovation ecosystem and describes the process through which innovation occurs
social entrepreneurship education (SEE) focuses on creating social value by reorganizing human and other resources
Summary
Social enterprises have been noteworthy as a key solution to a variety of social problems within current market economy systems [1]. Enterprises create economic and social value in the market economy system, they raise various social problems, such as inequality and environmental pollution [2]. Social enterprises are organizational entities that create both economic and social values by solving social problems through business mechanisms [4,5,6]. They utilize the economic value that they create as a resource to solve social problems and underpin sustainable development. Unlike traditional business organizations that create social value by participating in social projects to complement the core objective of economic value generation, social enterprises focus first on their social mission to create positive social impact and measure the impact to communicate and collaborate with various stakeholders [6]
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