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In this book chapter, we analyse social entrepreneurship (SE) development in the Western Balkans and present a regional overview. SE has become a globally known contributor to alleviating societal, economic, social, and environmental concerns. Its influence on increasing people’s quality of life has put the concept on a pedestal, and the Balkans are no different. The new advances have increased the efforts from the third sector in advocating for increased visibility, recognition, and support for social enterprises (SEs) as contributors to the development of resilient communities and facilitating the countries’ recovery from economic, social, and environmental crises. To provide a regional development overview, we use the institutional perspective. We base the analysis on data by applying qualitative methods, including document analysis, conference speeches, round tables, consultations, and other impactful events conducted over the last decade. The evidence suggests that the Western Balkan countries are similar in their development and lack a clear vision, a strategic pathway, and sustainable solutions to accelerate the sector’s growth. The awareness of the SEs’ contributions is still low, hindering their impact and potential scalability. Raising awareness campaigns is much needed to increase SEs’ visibility, recognition, revenues, and financial sustainability. Intersectoral collaboration is not at a suitable level, and the coordination and partnerships between the SE actors are lacking. The region needs to make a significant and consistent effort to facilitate the sector’s development and support SEs to provide the expected societal impact.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understanding social entrepreneurship via a systematic literature review (SLR) of the construct’s varied definitions to assess the means by and the context in which the phenomenon is studied.

The SLR follows a deliberative, replicable, methodical and transparent process, including a quality assessment tool of definitional sources. SLR results are organized around Gartner’s (1985) framework of new value creation, thus additionally analysing the dimensionality with which social entrepreneurship has been studied. Finally, a qualitative analysis of the definitions reviews commonalities of themes within definitions to assess trends.

Significant research has been dedicated to defining social entrepreneurship. However, many efforts do not explore the full dimensionality of the concept, as findings reveal that no definition explored the four dimensions of entrepreneurship posited by Gartner (1985). Further, a time-series review of definitions demonstrates limited advancement in definitional development. Geographic location of definition authors and key word analysis challenge previous research on the activation of social entrepreneurship in literature.

Although the SLR was conducted in a controlled manner, this study is time-bound and only reviews English-language publications. While results are analysed using a recognized framework (i.e. Gartner, 1985), other conceptual models are available. Although two researchers independently categorized and analysed definitions, assessment of quality was limited. The results offer an insight into how the conceptualization of social entrepreneurship may be advanced as well as the important role of practitioners in the development of the construct’s theory and practice.

The detailed appraisal of definitions may guide practitioners as they strive to define their own organizational efforts. The multi-dimensional conversation of social entrepreneurship in this study enables the leaders of different organizational types to ensure their social entrepreneurship activities consider all dimensions (i.e. environment, individual, organization and process). The SLR allows the practitioner to further engage in deep discussion on the future of the field by cataloguing their influence on the multi-dimensionality of the social entrepreneurship construct. Organizational leaders may also use the findings to generate more discussion around what is missing from the definitions (i.e. empathy, responsibility, resourcefulness and transparency).

The findings synthesize social entrepreneurship definitions across multi-disciplinary fields and contexts and within a multi-dimensional framework utilizing an infrequently used literature review method within social sciences.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) has become the engine propelling the rapid expansion of the social/environmental sector; thus, the authors need to examine it from different perspectives. First of all, it is vital to understand the concept of SE in an attempt to understand the most basic question: what makes an entrepreneurship social and what makes a social initiative a SE? Second, it is important to know the tools to develop a SE such as the business model canvas and design thinking, among others, which are adapted to SE, as well as tools that are unique to the sector such as impact measurement and impact investing. Third, aspiring SEs have to understand the current ecosystem in order to take advantage of the enormous support that the SE ecosystem has to offer thanks to global players such as Ashoka, the Schwab, and Skoll foundations as well as prominent Latin American players such as New Ventures Group, ANDE, and collective company-driven initiatives such as Momentum led by BBVA Bank that have supported more than 10,000 SE all over the world. Finally, the authors will introduce the case of low-income house builders Hábtiva and a student challenge to ignite aspiring social entrepreneurs. This chapter provides a glimpse of the field SE by focusing in its importance in our current challenging world, its definition, some tools used in the field, the current ecosystem of SE, how to measure social impact, and some cases and challenges.

Strategic entrepreneurship (SE) is effective in the formation of business strategies that involve simultaneous opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking behaviors. SE revitalizes firms to achieve competitive advantage in the current turbulent markets. The purpose of this paper is to understand in more detail how SE influences business growth (BG) through the lens of dynamic capabilities (DC) theory.

Using a quantitative research method and structural equation modeling technique, the measurement and structural models were developed to test the research hypotheses. For this purpose, a survey was conducted among 159 internet of thing (IoT)-based companies in Iran.

The findings show that DC theory provides the theoretical underpinning to describe the effect of SE and its dimensions on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition (EOR). Results also reveal that EOR mediates the relationship between SE and BG. Furthermore, this research empirically verifies that organizational entrepreneurship and value creation moderate the relationship between EOR and BG.

IoT identifies a pathway for continuous change that helps to improve firms’ competitiveness and innovation. This paper provides a new insight into how Iranian IoT-based companies can enhance their SE to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities and gain competitive advantage. Mainly, this study singles out and discusses the variegated features that characterize the implementation of SE by Iranian IoT-based companies having different characteristics.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is an emerging social phenomenon gaining tangible traction for its ability to tackle complex social and environmental problems against a backdrop of global sustainability challenges. This paper aims to unpack SE intentions, mindset and motivations to elucidate “why” and “how” social entrepreneurs (SE) initiate, perpetuate and sustain pro-social entrepreneurship activity. It specifically asks why SE do what they do, how they develop and sustain pro-social entrepreneurship action and how these normative drivers affect the social change process.

This qualitative research adopts an exploratory multiple case design approach in examining the tacit experience of eight SE tackling complex water, sanitation and environmental challenges in Indonesia, and combines this with scholarly insights from multiple bodies of knowledge. Case studies include six SE recognised by the Ashoka Foundation and two lesser-known “social enterprises” to enable finding patterns across the cases and compare key differences between pro-social and conventional entrepreneurship. Triangulating semi-structured interviews with secondary data analysis and semi-ethnographic fieldwork observations, this paper provides a rich theoretical and empirical basis to understand the emerging transformative potential of SE in tackling a range of sustainability issues.

Interviews with eight SE highlighted their intentions to advance inter and intra-generational equity, social justice and sustainability, bringing socially embedded empathetic values and a growth mindset to overcome challenges associated with disrupting existing social order. Direct engagement with the SE revealed 10 critical enabling factors to foster future SE potential, namely, individual background and experience, unmet social needs, empathy, sense of belonging, willingness/passion to alleviate other’s suffering, growth mindset, internal/external catalysts, intrinsic and extrinsic needs, beliefs and goals and declaration of a social mission to ensure consistency in behaviour and action. This demonstrates that while SE are motivated by a variety of self and other-oriented mechanisms, it is ultimately the process of developing empathy, a growth mindset and declaring a social mission that drives and sustains pro-social entrepreneurship action.

The output of this research is a new intentions model, which outlines the 5 phases of enterprise development and 10 critical enabling factors to foster future SE potential. These insights are critical to leveraging the emerging transformative potential of SE in tackling the world’s most urgent sustainability issues.

The paper presents a deep analysis of data on individual background, experience and characteristics in developing a new SE intentions model.

The distinct focus on inputs over processes and outcomes answers to a highly elusive topic while offering an alternative approach to understand how SE create remarkably different strategies, processes and outcomes to conventional developmental approaches.

Considering that many unanswered questions remain regarding the antecedents to entrepreneurial intentions, the purpose of this study is to develop insights from existing theories in entrepreneurship frameworks and apply these in the social entrepreneurship context. Consequently the study examines to what extant beliefs and cognitions shape social entrepreneurial intentions.

Hypotheses were statistically tested using multiple regression analyses based on survey data (n = 156) from individuals in South Africa.

Results support the hypotheses where entrepreneurial alertness significantly explained social entrepreneurial intentions, while self-efficacy showed a positive mediating effect in this relationship.

Policymakers encouraging social entrepreneurship should not only focus on external support factors such as financial support but also deliberately develop interventions by focusing on beliefs and cognitions, which the study has identified as important predictors of social entrepreneurship intentions.

By introducing previously unrelated individual-level factors to social entrepreneurship, closer empirical links are created between these factors in this study.

The purpose of this study is to integrate and extend two models of entrepreneurial intention to investigate the drivers of sustainable entrepreneurial intention among intermediate undergraduate university students in Nigeria. Specifically, this paper aims to introduce education for sustainable entrepreneurship into the integrated model, thereby fitting the model into the context of sustainable entrepreneurship.

Data was gathered with the help of a structured questionnaire from 435 students of a university in Nigeria. The students passed through a special entrepreneurship training in which they were educated on the concept and practice of sustainable entrepreneurship. SmartPLS was used to test the proposed structural model.

The findings revealed that education for sustainable entrepreneurship significantly influences all variables of the integrated model, but has nonsignificant direct influence on sustainable entrepreneurial intention. Sustainable entrepreneurial intention is significantly driven by attitude and propensity to act. Therefore, the inclusion of education for sustainable entrepreneurship into the regression equation adds to its explanatory power.

This study contributes toward understanding of sustainable entrepreneurial intention of intermediate university students in a developing world context – Nigeria. Above all, it is among the few studies that shed light on the strength of education for sustainable entrepreneurship in the formation of sustainable entrepreneurial intention among students. This study proposes integration and extension (by adding education for sustainable entrepreneurship) of the theory of planned behavior and entrepreneurial event model in learning about students’ intentions to engage in sustainable entrepreneurship.

Scholars researching entrepreneurship argue that the distinct characteristics of social entrepreneurs, together with the particular category of opportunities they pursue, invite us to further understand social entrepreneurship (SE) as a distinct field of investigation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate opportunity recognition behaviour of social entrepreneurs and closely related unique attributes of empathy, moral judgement (MRJ) and self-efficacy, in an emerging market African context.

A survey was administered to social entrepreneurs across two of the largest provinces in South Africa, namely Cape Town and Gauteng. Hypotheses were statistically tested using correlational analysis and hierarchical regression with mediation effects.

Results reveal that social entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) plays a significant mediating effect in the relationship between MRJ and social opportunity recognition. Moreover, perceived MRJ and social ESE act as important determinants of increased social opportunity recognition.

This study has brought to attention the relevance of opportunity recognition to social entrepreneurs, while recognising their distinctive features in terms of empathy and MRJ. While self-efficacy and opportunity recognition are relatively well established in the traditional entrepreneurship literature, this study extends the reach of these variables into the SE domain.

The question of how to integrate strategic and entrepreneurial management to achieve a better balance between advantage‐ and opportunity‐seeking behaviours has received increased academic and practitioner interest in recent years. However, little consensus exists over the meaning of this concept of “strategic entrepreneurship” (SE), its constituents and its operation. This paper aims to address these issues.

In response, the paper reports a thorough review of SE's origins and current conceptualizations to map its core components and charts critical research directions for this exciting emerging field. Analysis of the terrain of SE reveals eight core components drawn from entrepreneurship and strategic management that captures conditions necessary for its application.

From this analysis, the paper offers an alternative model of SE, and charts four key research areas with accompanying research questions to inspire future research. These outcomes offer avenues to further sharpen the understanding of how SE might operate both in theory and practice.

A relative lack of analysis and integration of external factors influencing and shaping the process of SE represents a limitation. Also, whilst the authors have attempted to review, assess and understand its position in the entrepreneurship and strategic management literature, the full range of its strengths and weaknesses cannot be grasped.

The paper illustrates how these four question areas pose significant promise to better understand the development and application of SE in research and in practice.

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.