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Social entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the development of innovative solutions to society's most challenging problems. Since social entrepreneurship flourishes in resource-constrained environments, social innovation may depend on the extent to which social entrepreneurs can combine and apply the resources at hand in creative and useful ways to solve problems – “bricolage.” Moreover, innovating for social impact relies on a set of institutional and structural supports – “innovation ecology,' which can facilitate or impede innovation. Our research empirically examines these variables as drivers of systemic social change through scaling and replication – “catalytic innovation” (i.e., the development of products and services targeted to unserved markets). Results of a survey conducted with 113 social entrepreneurs indicate that, while innovation ecology is associated with the degree of catalytic innovation, it is mediated by the role and degree of bricolage that social entrepreneurs bring to solving problems. These findings reinforce the role of entrepreneurs as the indispensable agents of social change.

Advance the state-of-the-art on how frugal innovation links to sustainability outcomes and based on content analysis of empirical publications in the field of frugal innovation, analyzing when and how FI is connected with social, environmental and economic outcomes.

Quantitative content analysis on empirical papers published on frugal innovation, using data visualization techniques to disclose relationships among the constructs adopted. Materials were collected following a step-wise methodology. In total, 130 articles were identified, read in depth and coded according to five main categories: context; development; implementation, adoption, diffusion; characteristics; and impacts.

The potential of frugal innovation to drive sustainability outcomes is influenced by the type of actors developing the innovation, regarding their organizational form (large firms, small firms, non-firm actors), their geographical origin (foreign or local) or motivations (mostly profit-motivated or socially-oriented). Collaboration plays a key role along the various stages of the frugal innovation cycle and is thus relevant for its potential to drive sustainability outcomes. The results reaffirm the need for greater attention to where and when sustainability-enhancing outcomes of frugal innovation are more likely to occur.

This study provides a qualitative study based on content analysis of empirical studies to explore the associations between frugal innovations and improved economic, environmental and social sustainability outcomes. The key novelty of this study lies in the systematic coding of each paper regarding the features of the innovation, the innovators, and the outcomes achieved. This allows taking stock of the evidence emerging in such a scattered literature, quantifying the extent to which insights take place in the empirical literature, looking for correlations, and highlight research gaps to understand to what extent frugal innovation can contribute to sustainable development.

From its earliest incarnations, entrepreneurship has been linked to innovation, and often innovations with a societal or social impact. Although classical economists discussed the role entrepreneurs play in handling risk in an economy (Hébert & Link, 2009), perhaps the greater risks have been the social impacts which entrepreneurship brought to societies (Drucker, 1985). The power of mercantile economies like the Phoenician or two thousand years later the British came as much from the new ideas and processes they introduced to the societies of trading partners as from the goods traded.

This paper aims to study is to empirically investigate the role of entrepreneurial orientation (EOR), entrepreneurial bricolage (EBR), technology orientation (TOR), sustainability orientation (SOR) and Trust (TUR) in the sustainable enterprise performance (SEP) of tech startups in India. It uses a framework grounded in the EBR theory, upper echelon theory and resource-based view theory.

A primary survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire amongst 285 sample respondents from 425 tech startups and the data were analyzed using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling technique.

The findings suggest that EOR and TOR significantly influence SEP. SOR and TUR do not significantly affect the SEP. EBR plays a significant mediating role between TOR and EOR and SEP in the context of Indian technology-based startups.

This cross-sectional study has a geographic limitation as it was conducted in Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune and their suburbs. As this study was carried out in the context of tech startups in a developing country such as India, caution needs to be exercised while generalizing the findings of this study to other regions, countries and cultural contexts.

This study highlights the significance of TOR and EOR in the long-term SEP to the budding entrepreneurs who have strong EOR and deploy EBR strategy to start their new business ventures. It also infers that few of the reasons for the failure of tech startups are because of the lack of attention to TUR and SOR.

This study has a novel contribution as it empirically validates the role of multiple constructs such as EOR, TOR, TUR, SOR and EBR toward SEP in a resource-constrained startup environment in the context of a developing country such as India.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate longitudinal patterns of ICT and non‐ICT products' adoption over life cycles.

The Bass diffusion model is used to discern distinctive changes in users' adoption behavior due to the innovation and the imitation effects.

The innovation effect is more influential for innovators and opinion leaders than it is for all adopters. However, it diminishes as time passes. Conversely, the imitation effect becomes a more powerful factor for the early majority, late majority and laggards. The imitation effect in the ICT industry is greater than that in the non‐ICT industry, revealing the high network effect in ICT diffusion.

Mobile phones are not the representative of all ICTs as the automobiles also do not represent all utility products. More ICT and conventional products need to be included and compared for greater generalization of the results from different countries.

By identifying the strong innovation effect of a new product at the early stage of its adoption, and the social network effect in the acceleration of the adoption speed through massive numbers of imitating consumers, this research reveals the ever shrinking product life cycle and therefore the importance of continuous disruptive innovation as a competitive strategy for organizations.

The paper provides new theoretical insights into the technology adoption research by using a mathematical modeling methodology using real data. The study provides new insights into the strategic implications of innovation and imitation effects for technology service providers.

There has been a profound neglect in most of the literature dealing with social entrepreneurship on the relationship between social entrepreneurship and technological innovation. The purpose of this paper is to provide new insights into that relationship by using the case of Prezi, a Budapest, Hungary-based mission-driven software company.

The research approach used for this paper is qualitative in nature and uses the case study methodology. Evidence was based on interpretative/qualitative interviews and direct observations.

Using the example of Prezi, the authors show that social entrepreneurial activities and projects could act as an important innovation source for technology-based industries.

The authors use the case of Prezi and describe several of Prezi’s socially driven projects and show how they influence those involved with the company to continuously innovate and solve problems that have positive impact in the community as well as their core product offering.

Public procurement of innovations (PPIs) addresses a specified need of the public-sector customer or aims at fostering private firms’ innovativeness. In an operational sense, issues of information asymmetry and risk sharing between the public agency and the supplier are of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the contract design issues of PPI.

Explicit and implicit contracting methods are reviewed, and a conceptual framework is proposed in which procurement characteristics are analyzed, focusing on the dimensions of the supplier’s sensitivity to the procurement risk and the power of implicit contracting methods.

Because of its complex nature, applying cost-plus contracts instead of more common fixed-price contracts is advisable in PPI.

Possible reasons for the more prominent role of contract design in the USA as opposed to the European Union procurement are discussed.

Social innovations are defined as innovative products or services motivated by the goal of meeting a social need, with the opportunity to create new social relationships or collaborations. Although developing social innovations has been the primary concern of non-profit organizations so far, there are signs of an increasing involvement in this type of innovations of for-profit firms, in an attempt to accomplish their corporate social responsibility strategies. This notwithstanding, there is very limited knowledge on how for-profit organizations can develop a capability to manage social innovation projects. The purpose of this paper is to provide exploratory evidence to fill this gap.

The paper presents and discusses a case study of a firm that has been involved in social innovation for years. It is Intesa Sanpaolo, a for-profit organization that leads the Italian banking sector.

The case study points to the existence of three managerial antecedents of a superior ability in social innovation: integrating CSR in its business strategy with a strong commitment from the top management; separating the activities concerned with the development of social innovations from the rest of the organization, following to the structural ambidexterity model; applying the principles of open innovation to the development of social innovations, by involving in particular non-profit organizations as a source of ideas for new social innovation projects and leveraging them to enable adoption of the new products and services.

So far there is very limited knowledge on how for-profit organizations can develop a capability to manage social innovation projects. This paper provides exploratory evidence to fill this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the business education curricula in South Africa in relation to social entrepreneurship and to ascertain pre-service teachers’ perspectives of the reasons for social entrepreneurship not being included in these curricula as observed in classroom teaching practices.

Through interpretivist inquiry, third-year pre-service teachers’ (n=92) comments on online group blogs were analysed to clarify a range of meanings and understandings of their responses.

Social entrepreneurship as a concept and as an ideal as well as certain fundamental concept is not adequately integrated in the business education curricula in secondary schools in South Africa. Furthermore, the schools where the pre-service teachers conducted their teaching practice were failing to integrate activities associated with social entrepreneurship in their business education curricula.

The study was limited to a single tertiary institution. Similar studies in both developing and developed contexts in schools could be initiated as a means of teaching social entrepreneurship for social justice as a subject efficaciously.

The study recommends that social entrepreneurship should be implemented earlier in the secondary education system as a means of enhancing the social entrepreneurial capacities of school learners.

This is the first study examining the secondary education curricula in a developing economy, such as South Africa, in relation to the absence of the emerging concept of social entrepreneurship.