Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship refers to the use of entrepreneurial skills and practices to achieve social missions and goals. Social entrepreneurship involves pursuing opportunities to create social value by developing innovative solutions to meet social needs, deploying resources in novel ways to stimulate social change, or launching new enterprises aimed at generating positive returns to society. Such efforts result in social value creation, that is, positive social impacts and outcomes that can be assessed in economic terms. Examples of value creation with a social dimension include improvements related to education, poverty, healthcare, race relations, gender relations, and empowering people with disabilities.

Beyond basic definitions of social entrepreneurship, there is a plethora of idiosyncratic definitions about which there is little agreement. To wit, S. Bacq and J. Frank have ...