Social Entrepreneurship Business Models: Managing Innovation for Social and Economic Value Creation

Today humankind faces persistent ecological and social challenges that no single organization or individual can solve. Social entrepreneurship provides an innovative management perspective for addressing these problems by seeing them as an entrepreneurial opportunity. In order to emphasize the underlying mechanisms of how social entrepreneurs „do business“ we use the concept of business models as a generic framework. This concept helps to explain how social entrepreneurs creatively combine preexistent resources (e.g. financial, physical, human) in innovative ways and how value —financial and social —is created. We identify three social entrepreneurship business models - the „freemium“, the „catalyst“, and the „expertise broker“ model. We use three real-life examples to illustrate how social entrepreneurs have a distinct access to resources and integrate them innovatively in the configuration of their value proposition, value architecture, and revenue model.