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The Teen Entrepreneurship Competition (TEC) was an annual inter‐school competition that aimed to promote entrepreneurship education (EE) in Hong Kong (HK) secondary schools. This paper aims to: review and evaluate the implementation of the TEC over the years from 2003‐2010, and use the TEC as a case to demonstrate how EE can be advanced through capacity building in various ways and levels.

There were two key milestone phases for the TEC. This paper will describe and discuss the achievements made in Phase I and the capacity building for advancing the TEC in Phase II in details. Then, a critical analysis of capacity building for advancing TEC in Phase II will be made with a careful consideration of the TEC's design rationales, the research findings in Phase I and the three inter‐related levels of capacity building. Finally, suggestions will be recommended for further strengthening EE in schools.

The sustainability and advancement of the TEC are closely related to: advancing “Character Building” at the individual level, advancing “Partnership Building” at the institutional level, and advancing “Social Responsibility” at the societal level. However, the TEC might still overlook an alignment with the existing curriculum development. A further capacity building of course development and policy making should be sought.

This is a precious illustrative case study for the purpose of sharing useful information and genuine experience with those who are interested in promoting teen EE in schools.

Social entrepreneurship is gaining attention as a valid field for academic inquiry and a useful tool for funding a social mission and driving social change. As they are assimilated, innovative mechanisms and practices often require a new vocabulary and context to support precision in communication and clarity in analysis. This chapter takes a step toward merging previously disparate fields that may need to be aligned to help the advancement of social entrepreneurship and offers a neologism to describe this process. Primarily, it proposes that the real value of social entrepreneurship is an advancement in non-violent social change.

The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of how different aspects of the national institutional environment may influence the extent of innovative entrepreneurial activities across countries. Several institutional and conductive factors affecting a country’s capacity to support innovative entrepreneurship are explored.

Institutional theory is used to examine the national regulatory, normative, cognitive and conducive aspects that measure a country’s ability to support innovative entrepreneurship. A cross-national institutional profile is constructed to validate an entrepreneurial innovation model. The impacts of country-level national institutions on innovative entrepreneurial activity as measured by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data are assessed through structural equation modeling.

Knowledge about the influence of specific institutional aspects on innovative entrepreneurship, and hence of institutional structures within and across countries, is enhanced. For new innovative enterprises, conductive and regulatory aspects seem to matter most. All conductive factors have a significant and positive impact on entrepreneurial activity rates.

Results could support policy makers and practitioners in evaluating government policies’ effects on innovative entrepreneurship. Interventions should target both individual attributes and context. Future research could include longitudinal designs to measure the direction of causality.

Aspects such as regulatory institutions, and conductive factors such as information communication technology use and technology adoption, are important for innovation entrepreneurship development.

The literature on institutional theory and innovative entrepreneurship is highly limited. This study complements growing interest in empirical analysis of the effects of national institutions on innovative entrepreneurial activities and substantiates previous empirical work.

As good as existing measurements of entrepreneurial potential (EP) may appear in the literature, they are fragmented, suffer from the lack of theory integration and clarity, are inadequately specified and assessed and the dimensions are unordered by importance. These limitations of EP metrics have hindered entrepreneurial practice and theory advancement. There is a risk of atomistic evolution of the topic among “siloed” scholars and room for repetitions without real progress. The purpose of this paper was to take stock of existing measurements from which the authors developed a new instrument that is brief and inclusive.

The authors followed several steps to develop and validate the new instrument, including construct domain name specification, literature review, structured interviews with entrepreneurs, face validation by experts, semantic validation and statistical validation after two waves of data collected on employee and entrepreneur samples.

A clear operational definition of EP is proposed and serves as a starting point towards a unified EP theory. The new EP instrument is made up of 34 items classified into seven dimensions, which in order of importance are proactive innovativeness, management skill, calculated risk-taking, social skill, financial literacy, entrepreneurial competencies prone to cognitive and heuristic biases and bricolage. The authors provide evidence for reliability and validity of the new instrument.

Although a model is not the model, the authors discuss several ways in which the new measurement model can be used by different stakeholders to promote entrepreneurship.

The authors discuss the domain representativeness of the new scale and argue that the literature can meaningfully benefit from a non-fuzzy approach to what makes the EP of an individual. By developing a new EP instrument, the authors set an important pre-condition for advancing entrepreneurial theory and practice.

Israel is characterised by economic growth that is accompanied not only by prosperity but also by increasing poverty. This paper aims to conceptualise the role of Israel’s social enterprises in reducing the gap between prosperous and disadvantaged populations.

This qualitative study is based on 23 in-depth interviews. It makes use of a theoretical framework that incorporates two elements: cosmopolitanism and social entrepreneurship. Cosmopolitanism, together with government policies that aim to develop free enterprise and international trade, support entrepreneurship and advance education, accompanies and facilitates prosperity. Whilst prosperity increases inequality, social entrepreneurship develops as a tool to mitigate the side effects of economic growth in the form of the increasing gap between the rich and the poor.

This paper argues that the principal reason why the gap evolved and is increasing is in the discrepancy between rapidly rising requirements presented by the innovation-focussed economy and the workers’ skills. Based on interviews with social entrepreneurs who are (co)founders or managers of businesses with a social purpose, findings show that the gap between prosperity and social deprivation could be bridged by increasing workers’ capacity to align their skills with employers’ requirements, which is the area to which Israeli social enterprises contribute.

The paper argues that cosmopolitan orientation is one of the contributors to economic growth and innovation, whilst prosperity increases the gap between high- and low-income groups. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge about social entrepreneurs by applying the framework that makes use of cosmopolitanism as an important driver of Israeli social entrepreneurship, which helps to explain the role that social business enterprises play in reducing the gap between prosperous and disadvantaged populations.

Understanding of social values is emerging, particularly as the phrases “social impact” and “social value” and the measurement thereof, are ubiquitous in both practitioner and academic discourse today. These terms are particularly relevant to those involved in social initiatives that are required at some stage to demonstrate to stakeholders, investors, funders, or simply themselves that they have the capability to deliver. The purpose of this paper is to link the evaluation of social enterprise outcomes to individual efficacy beliefs.

The study is survey based (165 respondents) and conducted in two major cities in South Africa, where social entrepreneurship (SE) has unequivocal application. Social outcomes and self-efficacy are operationalized and measured along multi-dimensional scales. After checking the instruments for validity and reliability, correlational and multiple regression analyses are performed to determine the predicted relationship between the specified variables.

Empirical findings reveal that evaluation of social enterprise outcomes is associated with higher levels of self-efficacy. Significant results support the propositions that perceptions of capability are positively related to implementing a social vision, sustainability, social networking, innovativeness and financial returns.

The main implications of this study are that measuring SE efficacy in advance of funding may indicate probability of venture success.

The study is one of the first to provide a much needed account of the evaluation of social enterprises in relation to self-efficacy in an emerging market context.

Various theoretical issues and debates were investigated in order to measure quantitatively social entrepreneurship (SE) activity (SEA), together with the different skills associated with successful SE in South Africa.

This was primarily an exploratory study, using factor analysis and inferential statistical testing, based on a surveyed sample of 287 respondents, undertaken to measure SEA and concomitant SE skills. Empirical findings were interrogated in the context of existing research and comparisons with established SEA rates were made.

The findings were modest, particularly about the number of active and future social entrepreneurs. Moreover the validity and reliability of the instrument used to measure skills was established, offering insights into SEA and the types of skills associated with SE.

The study is limited by being in the early stage of theoretical development on the SE construct. The interpretation of the empirical findings, understanding SE and the associated skills, may serve as catalyst for this emerging and important activity in SA.

SEA and skills were empirically measured for the first time. This initial South African investigation advances the topic to where it has much relevance.

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, paying special attention to the new narratives that are emerging about this phenomenon in the context of Africa.

The paper addresses this issue, by comparing the meanings of what is called “social” in this context and in developed areas. The paper's particular interest in the use of language and narratives is grounded in the experience of how narratives and stories are genuinely constitutive and perfomative of people's actions.

This paper reveals that “social” in the social entrepreneurship narratives does not necessarily have the same meaning in different contexts. Specifically, when the phenomenon is re‐interpreted in the context of the discourses that come from a developing area such as South Africa, it adds flexibility and a more local sense to the entrepreneurs' social missions.

The study was affected by the limited availability of published data on social entrepreneurship in Africa. Economic challenges and failures by governments to access donor funds have resulted in militant governance thereby reducing the role of social entrepreneurship to negligible levels.

The study provides a narrative lens of looking at the challenges that social entrepreneurship is facing in Africa.

This study aims to investigate the synergies between the economic environment and the smart living dimension embedded in the current smart city initiatives, focusing on the localization of female entrepreneurship in contemporary cities. This interaction is under-investigated and controversial as it includes cities' practices enabling users and citizens to develop their potential and build their own lives, affecting entrepreneurial and economic outcomes. Building upon the perspective of the innovation ecosystems, this study focuses on the impact of smart living dimensions and R&D investments on the localization of female entrepreneurial activities.

The study uses a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and a panel dataset that considers 30 Italian smart city projects for 12 years to demonstrate the relationship between smart living practices in cities and the localization of female entrepreneurship. The complementary effect of public R&D investment is also included as a driver in the “smart” city transition.

The study found that the advancement of smart living practices in cities drives the localization of female entrepreneurship. The study highlights the empirical results, the interaction over the years and a current overview through choropleth maps. The public R&D investment also affects this relationship.

This study advances the theoretical discussion on (1) female entrepreneurial intentions, (2) smart city advancement (as a context) and (3) smart living dimension (as a driver) and offers valuable insight for governance and policymakers.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship. The findings provide valuable insights into the localization of female entrepreneurship in the context of smart cities.

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between different dimensions of organizational learning capabilities (OLC) and levels of social innovation in social enterprises.

The empirical strategy adopted is a cross-sectional study based on primary survey data. Following a survey of social enterprises in South Africa, statistically analysis is conducted using regression analyses to test the study hypotheses.

The findings show that the OLC dimensions of knowledge conversion, risk management, organizational dialogue and participative decision-making all have a significant and positive relationship with social innovation.

In many emerging economies, the notion of organizational learning appears to have considerable potential relevance, particularly as African countries are moving toward knowledge-based economies. By focusing on OLC, it is anticipated that social enterprises can configure and leverage the different factors in ways that enable them to overcome the constraints of the complex and unpredictable environments and increase their levels of social innovation.

The paper provides a pioneering empirical investigation into the impact that OLC has on levels of social innovation, in an under-researched emerging market context.