Social Entrepreneurship: Definitions and Challenges

• This work explores crowdfunding in social entrepreneurship within the sharing economy and digital platforms.
• It combines research on social entrepreneurship, value cocreation, the sharing economy, and digital platforms to provide insights on using platforms for financial and nonfinancial resources.
• An exploration of the ideal digital platform solution is made and explains how multifaceted platforms can meet various needs.
• It discusses how digital platforms allow crowdfunding to overcome certain issues

Social Entrepreneurship and its Unique Needs

• Social entrepreneurship is a critical, emerging topic that is inviting interest and research.
• It combines social mission, innovation, and business, in response to social needs and is an out-of-the-box solution.
• The four major factors include the characteristics of the social entrepreneurs themselves, their operative domain, the processes/resources used, and the mission.
• The aim is to create social value using market-based methods, address imbalances, and improve the overall situation for marginalized groups within the social system.
• Social ventures create social value or fulfill a mission, which differs from financial gains.
• Social entrepreneurship includes an economic focus for strategic sustainability.
• Social entrepreneurs seek more than profits.
• The distinct feature is its primary mission/purpose of social impact.
• Social entrepreneurs are benefitting greatly from crowdfunding, which allows ventures to seek monetary contributions from anonymous donors.
• It relies on large numbers of people donating small amounts of money.
• Crowdfunding has become part of the sharing economy.
• The sharing economy utilizes spare resources, physical or intangible, in the form of skills, talents, or time.
• Digital platforms can be applied to nonfinancial resources like time and skills.
• Social ventures can use the sharing economy to get funding, creative ideas, collaborate, and tap resources and skills.
• A key research question is explored, centering on how social entrepreneurs can use digital platforms to crowdfund, crowdsource resources, and cocreate value.

Challenges in Social Entrepreneurship

• Challenges evolve, including leadership where leaders must balance social and business aspects.
• There is a strong social component alongside the for-profit component, leading to competing institutional logics.
• Social ventures need a defined mission, planned outcomes, and measurable objectives.
• Scaling up a venture involves ethical, operational, and financial considerations, and is challenging.
• Raising capital, attracting investors, and using resources depends on legitimacy, which often impacts social ventures, especially new ones.
• Social ventures lack institutional support.
• Crowdfunding mitigates legitimacy, access to funding, lack of support, and liabilities due to small scales and lack of resources.
• As social ventures grow, their legitimacy issues diminish.
• Crowdfunding enables access to funding from millions of donors and can mitigate lack of institutional support by combining resource sharing.
• Digital platforms allow access to networks, governmental support and can mitigate many challenges faced by social ventures.

Digital Platform Roles

• New technologies and collaboration avenues have led to a competitive landscape for entrepreneurial ventures.
• Social entrepreneurship growth is connected to digital technology, as it increases awareness/opportunities for social ventures.
• There are two types of resources: financial and nonfinancial that are shared, and the gains may be fixed/tangible, or unfixed/intangible.
• The community is a significant dimension, including social entrepreneurs and stakeholders like supporters and funders.
• Sharing is enabled through platforms/networking.
• The sharing economy fosters connections and social relationships.
• Crowdfunding platforms are successful digital platforms and have helped rise the rise of other sharing economy enterprises.
• Crowdfunding connects funds with those who need it, and the sharing economy connects resources with those who need it.

Cocreation and Stakeholder Roles

• Crowdfunding and social ventures via the internet have led to the concept of cocreation.
• Cocreation creates something of value through shared ideas/knowledge.
• Individuals want to feel empowered and involved in value creation.
• Social ventures face difficulties in resource mobilization due to inexperience/credibility.
• The sharing economy has a significant impact, as customers recognize the value of products/skills/time they can share.
• Social ventures can connect with interested stakeholders who share nonfinancial resources.
• Social ventures identify collaborations, involving stakeholders who share money/time/abilities and benefit from community connections/satisfaction.
• Individual stakeholders collaborate with social ventures and cocreate value with benefits for themselves/the enterprise.
• Greater involvement leads to greater empowerment.

A Two-Pronged Proposal

• This section proposes how a multifaceted platform can be updated/evolved for use by social entrepreneurs to engage with users, while providing resources, financial and nonfinancial.
• This involves soliciting crowdfunding via digital platform interfaces, engaging stakeholders, and enabling the resource mobilization.
• Approach 1 is for immediate use and entails using a decision tree to analyze current digital platform utilization.
• Approach 2 is a long-term plan and entails working with social ventures to develop a multi-faceted platform.
• No single platform offers elements to aid social ventures to address all their needs, however through multiple digital platforms ventures may meet the needs of a more holistic platform that is available.
• Social ventures need to use available resources to address challenges simultaneously.
• Then determine what crowdfunding website is most suitable or whether their own website works best
• Then the venture should begin to amass the financial resources needed
• Following that embrace the sharing-economy mindset and use resource sharing websites for their needs.
• The third step involves other social connections and academic institutions to build support for governmental grants.
• Last make sure an ambidextrous approach where an enterprise is more robust and can tap into all three avenues simultaneously - funds, resources, and connection.
• The ecosystem of the platform consist of: Numerous social ventures; individuals seeking to donate; Individuals willing to contribute non financial resources, Agencies that provide grant and funds to social ventures.
• This has led to people connecting in ways to reuse and remobilize their resources to contribute towards collaboration, new ideas and to share the duties of social enterprise.

Platform design and success factors

• Social ventures need to know their stakeholders to use the platform effectively.
• All social ventures need the platform to be easy to use and reliable regarding payment, communications, and other back-end functionalities.
• It is critical that multiple stakeholders need the platform, making it possible for easy access to multiple government agencies, resource and time allocation and accurate match of needs.
• Social ventures need to be able to donate through credit cards, banks or other avenues for proper social allocation.
• Individuals need to be aware of social and economical changes regarding verification and donation to properly match resources with needs to make use of platform.
• Social ventures need to embrace a paradigm shift towards digital connectivity and community.
• First, the potential to use a venture that is benefiting from sharing resources with others needs to be made available for social ventures to have potential for long term solutions.
• Using these for crowd funding can continue to increase the awareness of issues that many face for traditional ventures to make progress to new and diverse sectors.
• Social Ventures can continue to use these sectors to make contributions and improve the connectivity for a strong economic and environmental future.