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This paper aims to investigate the motivations of social entrepreneurs in East Africa to create a social enterprise and their identified links to successful social entrepreneurship in East Africa.

The authors employed a qualitative method by performing thematic analysis on a set of interviews on social entrepreneurs from East Africa who are Ashoka fellows.

The findings suggest that intense personal experiences linked to past-life events as well as a high achievement orientation towards improving livelihoods and creating impact serve as key triggers for social entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurship focusses on system change at national and local levels. Their success is also seen when the social entrepreneurs have achieved their mission and are no longer needed; thus, they become irrelevant. The paper discusses the implications of these findings on the model used for sustainable social entrepreneurship in East Africa.

Based on an exploratory research on Ashoka fellows, the study adds insight to their motivations and success which can be used in a wider scale study of the same.

The authors advance the scarce empirical research on East African social entrepreneurs, link success factors of social entrepreneurship to a recent framework on motivation to engage in social entrepreneurship and stimulate further research in the area. The study contributes to the literature on social entrepreneurship by linking success factors of social entrepreneurship to a recent framework on motivation to engage in social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship is gradually becoming a potent driving force for economic and social development in developing countries as a result of governance deficits. The purpose of this study is to examine the determinant factors of successful social entrepreneurship in the emerging circular economy of Lebanon. The objective extends to exploring the mediating role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the success of social entrepreneurship in Lebanon.

Using a cross-sectional survey design, the authors collected primary data from 389 social entrepreneurs through questionnaires in selected locations in Lebanon. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The hypotheses were tested using linear regression and structural equation modeling (SEM) for predicting the impact of independent variable on the dependent variable. The validity, progressive and various models fits were tested using root mean square of approximation, root mean square of residuals, standard root mean square residuals, incremental fit index, fitness of the extracted and non-normal fit index.

The SEM estimations reveal that three main factors determine the success of social entrepreneurs in Lebanon, namely, environmental factors, psychological factors and prior experience. Moreover, the results reveal that support of NGOs positively moderates the relationships between the success of social entrepreneurship and two different variables (psychological factors and environmental factors), but failed to moderate the relationships between success of social entrepreneurship and four variables (experience, education, leadership and founding team composition).

The study contributes to the entrepreneurship and circular economy literature by explicating empirically the determinant factors of successful social entrepreneurship in Lebanon’s emerging circular economy. It also provides a fact-based social awareness on the role of local and international NGOs in supporting the social entrepreneurs in driving the idea of a circular economy. The study also validates multiple entrepreneurship theories.

Environmental uncertainty, turbulence, and heterogeneity create a host of strategic and operational challenges for today’s organizations (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998). To cope with the challenge of simultaneously developing and nurturing both today’s and tomorrow’s core competencies, firms increasingly rely on effective use of corporate entrepreneurship (Covin & Miles, 1999). These facts make it imperative that managers at all levels actively participate in designing and implementing a strategy for corporate entrepreneurship actions. The recent literature reveals that there is a general although certainly not a complete consensus around the position that successful corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is linked to improvement in firm performance (Ireland et al., 2001). Covin, Ireland and Kuratko (2003) suggest that corporate entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized as a legitimate path to high levels of organizational performance and that the understanding of corporate entrepreneurship as a valid and effective practice with real, tangible benefits is occurring across firm type and managerial levels. Other researchers cite corporate entrepreneurship’s importance as a growth strategy (Kuratko, 1993; Kuratko et al., 1993; Merrifield, 1993; Pinchott, 1985; Zahra, 1991; Zahra & Covin, 1995; Zahra, Kuratko & Jennings, 1999). As an example, Dess, Lumpkin and McGee (1999) note that, “Virtually all organizations – new start-ups, major corporations, and alliances among global partners – are striving to exploit product-market opportunities through innovative and proactive behavior” – the type of behavior that is called for by corporate entrepreneurship. Barringer and Bluedorn (1999) suggested that in light of the dynamism and complexity of today’s environments, “…entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors are necessary for firms of all sizes to prosper and flourish.” Developing an internal environment that cultivates employees’ interest in and commitment to creativity and the innovation that can result from it contributes to successful competition in today’s competitive arenas. A valuable and appropriate internal organizational environment is a product of effective work (often within the context of corporate entrepreneurship) by managers at all levels (Floyd & Lane, 2000).

We propose that strategies typically applied to support corporate entrepreneurship can be extended and applied at the national level, with the objective of stimulating not just entrepreneurship – but new ventures that grow. Only when individual ventures grow, can sustained growth occur at the level of the macroeconomy. Keys to growth of new ventures in this model include effective management of knowledge, resources, rewards, and infrastructure.

This paper aims to to explore power and legitimacy in the entrepreneurship education classroom by using Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological and educational theories. It highlights the pedagogic authority invested in educators and how this may be influenced by their assumptions about the nature of entrepreneurship. It questions the role of educators as disinterested experts, exploring how power and gendered legitimacy “play out” in staff–student relationships and female students’ responses to this.

A multiple-method, qualitative case study approach is taken, concentrating on a depth of focus in one UK’s higher education institution (HEI) and on the experiences, attitudes and classroom practices of staff and students in that institution. The interviews, with an educator and two students, represent a self-contained story within the more complex story of the case study.

The interviewees’ conceptualization of entrepreneurship is underpinned by acceptance of gendered norms, and both students and staff misrecognize the masculinization of entrepreneurship discourses that they encounter as natural and unquestionable. This increases our understanding of symbolic violence as a theoretical construct that can have real-world consequences.

The paper makes a number of theoretical and empirical contributions. It addresses an important gap in the literature, as educators and the impact of their attitudes and perceptions on teaching and learning are rarely subjects of inquiry. It also addresses gaps and silences in understandings of the gendered implications of HE entrepreneurship education more generally and how students respond to the institutional arbitration of wider cultural norms surrounding entrepreneurship. In doing so, it challenges assertions that Bourdieu’s theories are too abstract to have any empirical value, by bridging the gap between symbolic violence as a theory and its manifestation in teaching and learning practices.

Entrepreneurship is promoted as a solution to high rates of youth unemployment around the world and especially in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This paper investigates the potential for youth entrepreneurship to alleviate unemployment, focusing on Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia.

The authors examine who entrepreneurs are (in comparison to the unemployed), using multinomial logit models. The authors compare entrepreneurs' and wage workers' working conditions and earnings. They exploit panel data to assess earnings and occupational dynamics. They specifically use the Labor Market Panel Surveys of 2012 (Egypt), 2016 (Jordan), and 2014 (Tunisia), along with previous waves.

The authors find that entrepreneurs are the opposite of the unemployed in MENA. The unemployed are disproportionately young, educated and women. Entrepreneurs are older, less educated and primarily men. Entrepreneurship does not generally lead to higher earnings and does have fewer benefits.

Promoting youth entrepreneurship is not only unlikely to be successful in reducing youth unemployment in MENA, but also, if successful, may even be harmful to youth.

This study aims to solve the realistic dilemma between the importance of entrepreneurship and the high rate of entrepreneurial failure, and to point out the direction of subsequent research.

The paper takes the form of a literature review.

Entrepreneurial activities involve multiple dimensions. Entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial teams will be affected by multiple factors when starting a business, and sufficient attention should be paid to both the factors within the group and the factors outside the group such as institutional quality and market competition. High entrepreneurial failure rate is an essential characteristic of entrepreneurial activities, while solving this problem requires entrepreneurs to maintain passion, clarify their own motivation, improve their learning abilities and adopt appropriate entrepreneurial strategies to improve entrepreneurial performance. Meanwhile, it also urgent to build entrepreneurial teams with common goals, heterogeneous knowledge structure, outstanding learning ability, solid mutual trust, strong social influence and social capital. Successful entrepreneurship should adhere to the perspective of openness and cooperation. It should not only actively strengthen international cooperation but also fully adapt to the country’s system and culture. Sustainable growth of entrepreneurial enterprises requires not only stable commercial revenue but also responsibility to society, which in turn leads to a good reputation and high social recognition.

The authors hope this review can provide some insightful viewpoints for deepening the theoretical system of entrepreneurship, improving the success rate of entrepreneurship and promoting the sustainable growth of enterprises.

Further research can be carried out on the promotion of business growth by entrepreneurship at the micro level in the following aspects: analyze functional mechanism between innovation and entrepreneurship; entrepreneurship research by integrating multiple institutional contexts and cultural traditions; consider the changes in emerging technologies on entrepreneurial activities; diversified mechanism between entrepreneurship education and business growth.

This chapter shows how to construct and test case-based macro models. The chapter makes use of national data to examine influences on quality-of-life of national cultures as complex wholes and entrepreneurship activities in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Germany, and the United States (the six focal nations) plus Denmark (a small-size, economically developed, nation). The study tests McClelland’s (1961) and more recent scholars’ proposition that some cultural configurations nurture entrepreneur startups, while other cultures are biased toward thwarting startups. The study applies complexity theory to develop and empirically test a general theory of cultures’, entrepreneurship’s, and innovation’s impact on quality-of-life across nations. Because culture represents a complex whole of attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavior, the study applies a set-theoretic approach to theory development and testing of alternative cultural configurations. Each of 28 economical developed and developing nations is scored for the level of the national cultures for each of six focal countries. The study selected for the study enables multi-way comparisons of culture-entrepreneurship-innovation-QOL among large- and small-sized developing and developed nations. The findings graphically present the complex national cultural configuration (x-axis) with entrepreneur nurture/thwart (y-axis) of the 28 nations compared to the six focal nations. The findings also include recognizing national cultures (e.g., Switzerland, the United States) nurturing entrepreneurial behavior versus other national cultures (e.g., Brazil and India) thwarting entrepreneurial behavior. The study concludes with a call to recognize the implicit shift in culturally implicit thinking and behavior necessary for advancing national platforms designed to successfully nurture entrepreneurship. Entrepreneur strategy implications include the observation that actions nurturing firm start-ups by nations low in entrepreneurship will unlikely to be successful without reducing such nations’ high levels of corruption.

Entrepreneurship-oriented courses are increasingly being offered in higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world. However, in the case of Oman, where this study was conducted, little or no research has been conducted, to date, to explore the perceptions of students and faculty members regarding the entrepreneurship-oriented courses they participate in, which is a serious gap in the literature. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the beliefs and conceptions that learners and faculty at a private HEI in Muscat, Oman, had about the course entitled Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation (ENVC).

The primary and secondary research questions are addressed using a mixed-methods approach that includes an online student questionnaire answered by 110 students who had studied the ENVC course, a focus group discussion with eight students facilitated by MS Teams and semi-structured interviews with two faculty members.

The findings revealed that the study participants had a very positive view of the ENVC course discussed here as they pointed to several benefits, including improved knowledge of business and entrepreneurship concepts, increased familiarity with the local business environment, development of entrepreneurial intention and improvement of their critical thinking, creativity and innovation skills. In addition, the results revealed some concerns among the participating students, particularly regarding the lack of adequate training sessions on risk management and financial planning. The participants also requested hands-on experience through industrial entrepreneurship training and in-residence-entrepreneurship programs.

This study raises a number of possibilities for further research on this type of course in terms of students’ employability skills, know-how and agency when the time comes for them to enter the real world of business and employment. Future work would benefit from using a longitudinal survey on a group of alumni to triangulate and compare the various findings that were reached here. It would certainly be even more fruitful if conducted at two or more HEIs and with larger population samples to ensure broad coverage, representation and generalization. Work along these lines would certainly refine and extend our findings.

This study has significant pedagogical implications for future graduate students seeking employment, entrepreneurship course developers and faculty. Relatively, the educational outcomes of entrepreneurship education will also rely on the way entrepreneurship is being taught to students. It is recommended that entrepreneurship teaching should focus on cognitive development and active implementation of in-house incubation for well-planned innovative business ideas. This will provide opportunities for students to gain real-life experiences and identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the areas and skills that need to be maintained; hence, further research on the effectiveness of in-house incubation could best be considered for the next study. Another concern raised in this study is the lack of training in financial planning. Hence, further research can be considered on how to improve the financial planning skills of students for a start-up journey.

This course is designed in alignment with Oman Vision 2040, which places great emphasis on entrepreneurship as it plays an important role in the planned economic diversification and sustainability, in which innovation derived from entrepreneurship development will be used as the main driver for the development of infrastructure and educational systems that encourage entrepreneurship. Moreover, the ENVC course focuses on the concept of social entrepreneurship. It inculcates a sense of responsibility for supporting the immediate society among students. Learning the perceptions of students and teachers will provide opportunities to achieve their academic goals, which will reap economic and financial returns in the long run. The development of entrepreneurial skills and intentions of students will eventually help in boosting the country’s economy and its social fabric, thus improving the overall quality of life of Omani society.

Even though this study is an exploratory investigation, the framework sets out clear empirical insights into the entrepreneurship course development, its main contents, assessments and learners’ and faculty members’ perceptions of the design, intent, content and delivery of the ENVC course and has crucial implications for all the stakeholders. The originality of this case study lies in the fact that it is the first of its kind in the body of research as it links theory to practice and will be a useful reference for entrepreneurship course developers, higher education faculty and students.

Entrepreneurship is a source of innovation, job creation, and vibrancy for local and regional economies. As a direct result, there is a profound interest in creating an infrastructure that effectively encourages entrepreneurship and incubates entrepreneurial endeavors. Western State University has responded to this call by developing the Harvey Entrepreneurship Program, which is integrated in the Enterprise Residential College.The Harvey program provides a socially embedded experiential learning approach to entrepreneurial education. Faculty, students, entrepreneurs, and technical experts are drawn together in an environment that provides space for business incubators and an entrepreneurially focused curriculum. In this article, we present a case study in which we use qualitative research methods to explore the benefits and challenges of creating such a program.The delivery model that Enterprise Residential College provides for entrepreneurial education is examined through the perspectives of program administrators, faculty, and students. The findings reveal evidence that a residential college can form a powerful nexus of formal instruction, experiential learning, socialization, and networking to influence entrepreneurship. We discuss relevant findings that may aid others considering similar endeavors.