Social entrepreneurship: concepts and research areas

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is an emerging phenomenon that provides innovative solutions to persisting social problems such as poverty, lack of access to education, clean drinking water and human rights which were previously overlooked by businesses, governments and non-governmental organizations. The concept of social entrepreneurship has not been defined properly, and hence, is a contested concept. Further, given that it consists of many sub-concepts, it is defined as a cluster concept. Social enterprises engage in social entrepreneurship and they try to achieve sustainability by using business models. Being a new discipline, social entrepreneurship presents many opportunities in research. This paper discusses the important concepts in social entrepreneurship and potential research areas for prospective researchers.