The effective methods and practices for accelerating social entrepreneurship through corporate social responsibility

Abstract

The concepts of Social entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility have similar values from the social value perspective. Social entrepreneurship focuses on solving social issues, creating a positive social impact in an innovative entrepreneurial way, and profit maximization is not the primary target. Corporations focus on creating economic values and profit maximization; and use the CSR concept as a tool to maintain socially responsible business conduct. Both CSR and social entrepreneurship concepts represent the same sustainable values in different ways. Thus, finding effective methods for accelerating social entrepreneurship through CSR activities will be fruitful for the betterment of the corporation’s stakeholders, social entrepreneurs, and society at large. This paper aims to explore the current CSR activities of corporations that influence social entrepreneurship development and to identify the most effective methods/practices to accelerate social entrepreneurship. This study follows the qualitative inductive research methodology; and, the content analysis method has been used to analyze the collected data through the in-depth semi-structured expert interviews. It has been found that the current CSR practices for social entrepreneurship development are comparatively less than other community development and philanthropic considerations. Moreover, the challenges for social entrepreneurs and the expectations of corporations have been thoroughly discussed. The effective methods and practices have been suggested for both corporations and social entrepreneurs to accelerate social entrepreneurship by CSR activities with mutual benefits and creating social value; as a win-win situation.