Social entrepreneurship finance: the gaps in an innovative discipline

What is it about?

The innovative discipline of social entrepreneurship is gaining increased attention from academia and practitioners across the globe. Owing to its financing challenge, academic pedagogies are seeking methods to strengthen the social financing dimension of this emerging discipline. Little is known about what works and the skills needed to obtain funding for a social venture idea. This paper aims to bridge this gap in social entrepreneurship education by portraying diverse perspectives on the topic from multiple actors in two cross-cultural contexts. A qualitative case analysis was conducted to explore France and the United States. We interviewed social entrepreneurship academicians and practitioners (impact investor and social entrepreneurs) to understand from them as to what they think are their current experiments and future thoughts about integrating finance to their existing curriculum for social entrepreneurship. We found multiple facets of social entrepreneurship finance construct, not only focused on specific financial skills but also on a general approach of entrepreneurial venture designs. It appears that multidisciplinary knowledge is sought, not only on the topic of finance but also other disciplines that can broaden its scope of financing to a larger investor domain. While in France, this came out prominently as a need for integrating the financial communication skills to personify the social value creation process, in the US it was pointed out as the need for having a contractual knowledge to differentiate investment opportunities and legally comprehend the risks levels in them.

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