Social and commercial entrepreneurship: Exploring individual and organizational characteristics

This study extends our current knowledge of the social entrepreneur and the activities he/she is involved in and contrasts them with our understanding of commercial entrepreneurs. For the purpose of generating empirically-driven propositions, we bring together insights from current empirical investigations and insights from unique large-scale data from the GEM 2009 survey on social entrepreneurship covering Belgium and The Netherlands. Findings are refined with insights from interviews with key informants in both countries. In general the generated propositions seem to indicate a rather fragile entrepreneurial profile in terms of effort put into the organisation or activity, self-confidence, ambition in terms of employment growth, funding from the sale of products and services and progression to more mature stages of the entrepreneurial process. Furthermore, social entrepreneurs are more likely to be younger, more highly educated and they perceive legitimation of entrepreneurs in society differently than do their commercial counterparts.