Analysis of the factors determining social entrepreneurship

The concepts of social entrepreneurship, social entrepreneur and the organizations they create -that are social enterprises- are relatively new in the academic literature. Influencing the dynamism of the economy, social entrepreneurship can be briefly described as an activity involving innovation for social impact in order to find solutions for the social problems. Being aware of the social problems, social entrepreneurs act on these problems by applying entrepreneurial procedures that require opportunity identification, innovativeness and income generation.This study investigates who the social entrepreneur is and the factors determining socially entrepreneurial behavior. Having this aim, data was collected from 205 social entrepreneurs from 47 countries who are fellows of Ashoka and Schwab Foundation (funding organizations to social entrepreneurs) via web based survey method. As a result, socially entrepreneurial behavior was found to be positively affected by the factors of creative leadership style, creative challenge loving, social network, self confidence, belief in helping the needy, spirituality, belief in social solidarity, uncertainity avoidance, individually achievement orientedness and negatively affected by power distance. Moreover, socially entrepreneurial behavior is more likely to occur in the individuals who had a previous negative life event, who mostly have lived in rural, who have had role models and in the countries whose human development index is lower.Besides the contribution of this study to the literature which fills an important gap in the social entrepreneurship area, results obtained to determine socially entrepreneurial behavior will be a guide to develop social entrepreneurship for the practitioners in the field.