| Abstract |
Scholars, governments, and society are interested in how entrepreneurship and innovation can help overcome the challenges that humanity is facing. Investment has been done to search new business models for sustainable development. But theory still needs progress to examine and support practice. This paper poses a taxonomy based on the social entrepreneurial theory to offer a classifications structure, helping theoretical consolidation. It also enlarges the research focus by describing changes in the Portuguese social economy, highlighting the relationship between incumbent and new SEIs. The research design relies on several statistical steps to comply with topic complexity and delivery a structure that allows further replication. Exploratory factor and cluster analyses provided the information structure, confirmed by MANOVA and post-hoc tests. A social entrepreneurial initiative (SEI) can be Persistent, Innovative or stuck in the middle., Persistent SEI are the best when the innovation regards risk and cost reduction. If the main goal is to solve a critical social problem or sustain effective social change, the solution will be riskier and more expensive. In that case, Innovative SEIs are the best. It is hard to cut cost and go for innovations simultaneously, so SEIs stuck in the middle tend toward underperformance. |
