Societal Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness

This book provides an opportunity to explore the societal effects of entrepreneurship and its result on competitiveness. Over the last decade society has changed as the consequence of demographic shifts and increased usage of information communications technology. This has influenced the type of entrepreneurship individuals and firms to engage in and the focus of their businesses. Despite the importance of society to the speed and rate of entrepreneurship, little research exists that specifically examines societal entrepreneurship and competitiveness. This book aims at narrowing this research gap by discussing the interface between society and entrepreneurship. The core theme emerging from the chapters in this book is that the context of entrepreneurship is dependent on societal perceptions.

The aim of this chapter is to present and analyze the role of public entrepreneurship programs in fostering technology-based entrepreneurship in Turkey. More precisely, the authors of the chapter present and analyze the public policy programs aimed at entrepreneurship that have been put into action in Turkey in the last 20 years. The particular focus is on the type of programs that have been introduced, what have they achieved so far, and their contribution to the economy in terms of technology-based entrepreneurship. Together with the statistics about the output of the programs, data are also provided by a series of interviews with technology-based entrepreneurs to develop a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of those programs. Recommendations and ideas are derived from the research to improve these programs.

This chapter explores the context of global ventures, gives an overview of an entrepreneur’s motivations, and discusses literature on internationalization strategies of firms. Entrepreneurs innovate and find new ways to create or discover new opportunities, start a new venture, or grow an existing venture. Indeed, firms grow through sustainable and innovative process considering economic, social, and environmental protection (the three pillars of sustainability). Indeed, entrepreneurial motivations to take business globally can be because of “push” or “pull” forces such as the creation of global products and services, access to global market, access to strategic resources, and access to global sourcing. However, the capability to internationalize is dependent on the interaction between entrepreneurs’ internal resources and external constraints. These constraints are explained by the Ghemawat’s CAGE Distance Framework, including “cultural,” “administrative,” “geographic,” and “economic” challenges.

This chapter attempts to advance our understanding regarding social innovation with a focus on public sector organizations. The aim is to answer the following question: “How does a manager’s novel knowledge gained from decisional interventions act as a resource to achieve social innovation?” The study employed a qualitative research approach. Findings have stemmed from secondary sources such as officially published reports and media releases of three local councils of Victoria, Australia. The data were first contextually positioned and then analyzed by following the Gioia methodology. Research findings indicate that tacit knowledge gained by public managers helps them to make better decisional interventions. In different situations such as handling disturbance, negotiating with other parties, allocating resources, or being an intrapreneur, the decisions and its quality will be improved if public managers enhance their personal knowledge. This study also offers policymakers a new approach to deal with the social problems innovatively. It, therefore, provides insights on topics such as sustained social transformation through public reforms, navigation of resources, and wise leadership.

Understanding student’s intentions with regard to entrepreneurship as a possible career pathway is important for the development of the formal economy. Presented here are the results from a longitudinal study conducted between 2010 and 2014 involving a sample of 1,513 undergraduate students, of which 54 agreed to be interviewed. The research is qualitative and has combined the Opportunity Structure with the Theory of Planned Behavior to understand the reasons why students chose to start a business either just prior to or within one year of entering university, and their intentions upon graduating. The results show that many of these businesses sit within the informal economy, and may be categorized as low growth businesses with few skill requirements. Importantly, the research has discovered that these students are also highly strategic with regard to educational pathways, and many of these businesses are focused on delivering and/or sustaining a particular lifestyle while at university.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the implementation of a psychological assistance program on new entrepreneurs in a business incubator of a public university located in an emerging economy. The methodology was an intrinsic case study through qualitative approach. The findings suggest that this program had a positive impact on new entrepreneurs; it promoted a space for reflection, motivation and perseverance; it encouraged them to handle different emotions or factors to achieve its business targets. Thus, it helped them to improve the chances of success of their start-ups by learning and strengthening key psychological entrepreneurial competences.

This chapter provides an overview of a literature study on knowledge creation in client–consultant interaction. Clients and consultants can interact with each other to create knowledge (Kang et al., 2007), and knowledge creation can take place through dialogues (Hautala, 2011; Hennessy et al., 2016; Lorino & Mourey, 2013; MacIntosh et al., 2012; Majchrzak et al., 2012; Nursey-Bray et al., 2010; Quinlan, 2009; Rutten, 2017; Rutten & Boekema, 2012; Sapir et al., 2016; Tsoukas, 2009). But how do these dialogues “work?” In knowledge creation dialogues the following process (Majchrzak et al., 2012) is used: “(1) voicing fragments, (2) co-creating the scaffold, (3) dialoguing around the scaffold, (4) moving the scaffold aside, and (5) sustaining engagement” (p. 958). Interaction and dialogues are impacted by social elements, of which the use of power resources (Heizmann & Olsson, 2015) seems to be an interesting dimension in client–consultant interaction. We suggest doing further exploration to increase our understanding of how knowledge is created in client–consultant interaction.

This chapter is aimed at developing a conceptual framework for the internationalization process of social business (SB). The study has been conducted by reviewing the literature on social entrepreneurship, SB, and internationalization of small business. The study indicated that the internationalization decision for SB is taken by the motivation to create a social impact in the target foreign location. Based on the analyses and related literature, the entrepreneur-specific, firm-specific, and context-specific factors affecting the internationalization decision of social entrepreneurs are presented. As part of the framework, the chapter explains opportunity identification and the internationalization implementation phases for SBs. One of the key contributions of the chapter is the depiction of an internationalization framework for SB, which is an innovative addition to social entrepreneurship literature. The framework developed here could help social entrepreneurs to take decisions for scaling their businesses internationally.

Microfinance which refers to the issuance of microloans and the delivery of other related financial services to mostly necessity entrepreneurs has remained a major developmental tool across the developing world. With its inception from Bangladesh’s village of Jobra in 1976, microfinance has provided financial capital to many poor households to engage in income-generating activities in order to increase their assets and reduce vulnerability. Most often than not, necessity entrepreneurs who endeavor to start their own businesses depend on microfinance as a source of financial resource into their Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs). Using Ghana as the study country, this study investigated the impact of microfinance on the necessity entrepreneurs in the areas of poverty reduction, employment generation as well as the various difficulties associated with Microfinance delivery in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. We conducted a paper-based survey with 378 MSE owners from this region. The results indicate that microfinance has contributed to employment generation and poverty reduction in the Greater Accra region of Ghana through the provision of microloans to necessity entrepreneurs to engage in various types of income-generating activities. However, necessity entrepreneurs are faced with loan inadequacy issues coupled with under-financing difficulties. More so, they are also faced with non-flexible loan terms and cumbersome loan application procedures which do not support business expansion and employment generation. This study contributes to the debate on the social logic concept of microfinance delivery and poverty reduction. Microfinance therefore remains an indispensable tool in supporting necessity entrepreneurs in promoting self-employment.

This study analyses small-firm responses to an economic crisis, based on an empirical investigation in the post-conflict economy of Kosovo. Although the recent financial crisis affected all economies, we can expect differences in its effects across economies depending on their level of economic development, relative exposure to the crisis, as well as differences in entrepreneurial responses to adapt to the crisis. Kosovo makes a unique case to investigate the impact of the crisis on firm adaptive strategies to overcome or cope with the crisis. Drawing on data from in-depth, multiple case studies show that small firms during the crisis have successfully chosen to diversify and expand into new areas of business in order to compensate for low demand. By contrast, cost reduction was not a successful strategic response. The study demonstrates that although crisis affects many small firms, they show underlying resilience and a high level of adaptability and flexibility.

The emergence of social entrepreneurship, since its nascent stage, brought to light the imminent need to make the social value creating models workable by measuring the value created by them. This study reviews the existing literature from the past two decades to establish the role of accounting techniques in the measurement of social value. Nine databases were searched with the word combination “SROI” and “social enterprise” to determine the number of publications related to the field and the trend in its publishing. A classification of themes from selected studies was conducted to establish the direction of research in this context. Social return on investment (SROI) has been tested as a compatible measure and its implementation in various scenarios produced results; however, the inadequacy of its outcomes gives rise to the question whether any measurement tool can be appropriate for social value measurement because there is a need to justify the measurement of social value. The current trends call for further research in the field of customized measurement tools for the measurement of social value.

Recent interest in social entrepreneurship among young people has led to a heightened interest in new research. Few studies, however, have yet to investigate motivators of involvement, particularly from countries that are new to social entrepreneurship. The current study set out to better understand this phenomenon among young social entrepreneurs in Malaysia. In-depth one-to-one interviews with 12 young entrepreneurs were carried out to collect the data. Four themes and ten sub-themes emerged from the interviews, including early life experience (childhood experience and family experience), inspiration from clients and colleagues (interactions with the target group and exposure to social entrepreneurs), work-related experience (volunteer experience and job-related experience), and personal meaning (contribute back to society, desire for more meaning in life, and personal passions). The implications for policy-makers and interested parties are outlined in regard to enhancing participation and interest among youth for social entrepreneurship.