Examining Capabilities of Social Entrepreneurship for Shared Value Creation

Social entrepreneurship can be represented as a transitional vehicle that serves for creating shared value among an entrepreneur, society and the environment. Social entrepreneurship is a sub-discipline within entrepreneurship that remains a poorly-understood complex phenomenon. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was used to empirically analyze the complex relationships among a set of capabilities (namely mission-driven, stakeholder, cross-sector collaboration and environmental management) and social entrepreneurship. Their relationships and effects on the shared value in social, environmental and economic dimensions were analyzed based on data from 22 social enterprises in Thailand. Findings show that there was no single condition that necessarily and solely contributed to high or low social entrepreneurship and shared value. However, a sufficiency analysis revealed several combinations of conditions that sufficiently produced high and low expected outcomes. Because of the special characteristics of social entrepreneurship, the findings highlight the importance of fsQCA for finding different combinations of conditions leading to the same outcomes. In addition, the social and environmental values were found to be a source of competitive advantage and superior economic value that enable the identification and creation of new market opportunities.