Innovative start-ups and policy initiatives.

Year: 2020
Published in: Research Policy
Cited as: Audretsch, D., A. Colombelli, L. Grilli, T. Minola and E. Rasmussen (2020). “Innovative start-ups and policy initiatives.” Research Policy: 104027.

The field of social entrepreneurship has taken off with the explosive growth of different versions of the phenomena, like micro-credit, and with greater support, as from Ashoka and the Gates Foundation, but it remains lagging in theoretical understanding. We build upon the model of social entrepreneurship as a four unit system. We generate four new propositions based on existing theory describing social entrepreneurship as addressing market failures and as a behavioural process. Specifically, our propositions summarise our analysis of how the context and targets of social entrepreneurship activity co-evolve in the system, actively affecting outcomes initiated by social entrepreneurs’ behaviours.