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Abstract
The paper's primary objective is to revisit the existing definitions and frameworks of Social Entrepreneurship (SE) for clarity. The paper also attempts to learn from the benchmark global success stories of SE, and assess the ecosystem factors of SE, thereby capturing the major themes of SE and its transformation. The paper is qualitative and explores the various benchmark social entrepreneurship models and definitions, supportive ecosystem, and success stories from various literature sources, including books, journals, research databases, magazines, websites, original government published reports, corporate reports and related disseminated information. The paper utilises an inductive approach to understanding the social entrepreneurship models from global cases, identifies the major themes and presents the facts without any changes. The research paper is vital to understand and clarify the concept of Social Entrepreneurship by the industry, researchers, academia and government, and henceforth the revisit of SE definitions and models identifies the thematic areas of SE, its intent and the current scenario of SE. The key characteristics of SE are making social value, innovation, seeking opportunity, creating social change, making social welfare andhaving social results. From the assessment of various global success cases of SE, the developed countries in Europe and Nordic countries are found to be at a much-advanced level of SE transformation, focusing on environmental concerns, networking, recycling, profit orientation and government policy formulation. Alternatively, the developing countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean are still in the beginning phase of SE transformation, focusing on low-cost technology solutions, funding of social enterprises, not-for-profit orientation, and still lacking in linking the various stakeholders of social impact projects. The key factors of the SE ecosystem include government support, private sector involvement, educational institutional linkages, technology, innovation, funding opportunities and community empowerment, especially that of women.
Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship (SE), SEEcosystem, SE Transformation, Social Change, Innovation, Technology
1. Introduction
Social entrepreneurship is a panacea for major societal and environmental issues not addressed by mainstream businesses, corporates and government bodies. The major discouragement for the private sector, governments as well as the entrepreneurial community in venturing into a social entrepreneurship project is the lack of understanding of the social entrepreneurship business gap, lack of recognition by the government to incentivize such proposals, high failure rates and longer break-even periods in...