Florian Forster

The current paper aims to identify the antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention formation. Applying the theory of planned behavior on an international sample of 159 entrepreneurial volunteers in a corporate framework, we find positive relationships between empathy, perceived social norms, self-efficacy, perceived collective efficacy, and social entrepreneurial intentions with mediation by perceived desirability and perceived feasibility. Overall, we contribute to the upcoming domain of social entrepreneurship research by investigating the individual and environmental antecedents of social entrepreneurial action in a corporate setting.

Business Process Management is a powerful approach for organizations to improve performance and to improve customer satisfaction. In spite of the wide acceptance of the benefits of process awareness, the improvement of Business Processes is still more art than science. Existing guidelines for this topic remain vague and incomplete. So far, academic research has mainly focused on the description of successful Business Process Improvement implementations. Usually only the situations before and after implementation are outlined, but not the actual act of improvement. In summary, high level descriptions of business cases with limited potential for generalization form the existing body of knowledge around Business Process Improvement. The aim of this research is to investigate the causality behind Business Process Improvement. By analyzing relevant literature and real-case Business Process Improvement projects, patterns can be derived which explain the idea behind Business Process Improvement. The objective is to formalize a framework of Business Process Improvement Patterns.

We develop a structural equation model for business and social entrepreneurial intention and behavior to understand similarities and differences for-profit and social entrepreneurs. We conduct a conjoint field experiment to collect data in order to test how the mutual (social) entrepreneurial intentions relate to five dimensions of behavior: Knowledge relatedness, future predictability, personal value correspondence, social performance, and economic performance. Using an innovative research design with 1,544 assessments nested within the actions of 193 respondents, we find that individuals with a higher level of social entrepreneurial intentions are more likely to pursue opportunities than respondents with for-profit intentions. Moreover, we find proof that participants with intense social entrepreneurial intentions are more likely to act on opportunities with higher impact on society and a closer correspondence with their personal values. They are also more willing to engage in opportunities even if the future development is less predictable or if they lack relevant knowledge for the area.

We develop a structural equation model for business and social entrepreneurial intention and behavior to understand similarities and differences for-profit and social entrepreneurs. We conduct a conjoint field experiment to collect data in order to test how the mutual (social) entrepreneurial intentions relate to five dimensions of behavior: Knowledge relatedness, future predictability, personal value correspondence, social performance, and economic performance. Using an innovative research design with 1,544 assessments nested within the actions of 193 respondents, we find that individuals with a higher level of social entrepreneurial intentions are more likely to pursue opportunities than respondents with for-profit intentions. Moreover, we find proof that participants with intense social entrepreneurial intentions are more likely to act on opportunities with higher impact on society and a closer correspondence with their personal values. They are also more willing to engage in opportunities even if the future development is less predictable or if they lack relevant knowledge for the area.

The current paper aims to identify the antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention formation. Using an international sample of 159 entrepreneurial volunteers in a corporate framework, we find positive relationships between empathy, perceived social norms, self-efficacy, perceived collective efficacy, and social entrepreneurial intentions with mediation by perceived desirability and perceived feasibility. Overall, we contribute to the upcoming domain of social entrepreneurship research by investigating the individual and environmental antecedents of social entrepreneurial action in a corporate setting.

Social entrepreneurship has gained momentum recently, both in academia and in practice (Mair et al., 2006). Social entrepreneurs are expected to act in a selfless manner and contribute to society, rather than primarily seek to maximize their own personal financial profit. Behavioral intentions, which are defined as the degree of commitment toward future behavior (Krueger, 1993), have been found to be best predictors of individual behavior. The behavioral activities of social entrepreneurs cannot be understood without knowledge about the specific antecedents of their intention formation (Ajzen, 1991). Nevertheless, rigorous research on the dynamics and processes specific to social entrepreneurship remains scarce. Entrepreneurship requires taking action; with absence of intention, action is unlikely (Krueger, 2000). We review the entrepreneurial intentions literature and present a model for intention formation in the context of social entrepreneurship. Subsequently, we present our sample as well as findings from our adopted and applied model of social entrepreneurial intention formation (Krueger et al., 2000; Mair and Noboa, 2005). Then we present the methods and the results. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for future research and practice.

Social entrepreneurship research is still emerging as an area for academic inquiry. Literature is fragmented and lacking a coherent theoretical framework (Weerawardena & Mort 2006). There is a dominance of qualitative single and multi case analyses based on explorative anecdotal evidence (Mair & Marti 2006), and a lack of quantitative research to confirm or discard propositions/ hypotheses which have been generated qualitatively or conceptually in previous studies. With some exceptions (Weber & Kratzer 2009; Desa 2009), no large scale empirical studies have been conducted in this field so far (Short et al., 2009). Of particular research importance is the attempt to categorize the diverse types of social enterprises. Dees and Anderson (2006) propose a framing of these types along the intersection of two dominant schools of practice and thought: (i) the social enterprise school (see for many John 2006; Neck et al. 2009) and (ii) the social innovation school (see for many Zahra et al. 2009; Martin & Osberg 2007). To our best knowledge, no empirical analysis with our research focus exists.