Social Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship and Social Value Creation

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship has attracted attention from scholars, policy makers and practitioners in developed and developing countries around the world. Much of the early research was devoted to addressing definitional debates and contextual differences and only recently have scholars turned their attention to investigating the relationship between social value creation and opportunity identification and exploitation. The aim of the chapter is three fold. First, we review the rise to prominence of social entrepreneurship and the principal definitional and contextual debates. Second, we summarize the main research findings concerning social value creation and opportunity identification and exploitation. Finally, we identify ten critical topics for advancing social entrepreneurship knowledge and theory development.