by Subhanjan Sengupta | Posted on 20th January 2019

Enterprises in the context of a circular economy may be found to be close to the identity of social enterprises. Two decades of research on the social entrepreneurship phenomenon has established the fact that though it broadly signifies the confluence of the sensitivities of the third sector and the dynamics of market principles, what it means depends largely on the context, thereby making it a phenomenon in a context. The criteria that differentiates these enterprises from traditional for-profit businesses, is in the priority given to value creation rather than value capture; which means that for an enterprise to be a social enterprise, it would be a requisite to align the purposes and solutions towards creation of social or environmental value, through social innovation, on-ground social-change creation, and management efficiency. But due to the contextual embedded nature of the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, they can not be easily generalizable because when it comes to bringing social and environmental change / development, what is understood by sustainability might change as social, economic, and environmental issues are not the same in all contexts and thus the approaches for dealing with those issues are socially, legally, and politically determined

To explore the mechanisms for achieving social entrepreneurship processes by a circular economy enterprise, research can adopt the lens of open innovation, to see what social innovation practices can be adopted by such an enterprise for ecosystem collaboration to enable knowledge flow from outside to accelerate a sustainable social enterprise creation. The relevance of this is undisputed considering the increasing number of challenges and set backs in sustaining start-ups, thereby generating the need of open innovation; which means an orientation in innovation for seeking, accepting, and leveraging technological, entrepreneurial, and industrial support, that can flow into the firm from beyond the boundaries of the firm. This makes the role on open innovation in the social entrepreneurship process is a very new and inadequately explored area of enquiry.