Scale to change the world - An exploratory study on facilitating business growth for social entrepreneurs.

Sammanfattning: This paper explores social entrepreneurship with a specific focus on how social entrepreneurs apply processes and activities for growing their businesses from the broader field of entrepreneurship. The authors start with outlining a significant research gap: Growth for social start-ups currently finds almost no attention in academic research and is rather unexplored in the business world - which is critical considering that growth rate and scalability potential become most significant metrics to project the future success of new ventures. Within the first chapters of this work, the authors analyze established research from the broader field of entrepreneurship and identify entrepreneurial marketing as a key activity for entrepreneurs to pursue sustainable business growth - and that this business growth has a strong connection to customer acquisition. In order to apply those findings to the field of social entrepreneurship, the authors interview a sample of social entrepreneurs with a specific focus on (1) how they apply entrepreneurial marketing techniques to grow their organization and (2) what their very specific challenges in that context are. Two major obstacles for growth are identified: The high complexity of building a successful business when striving for both profitability and achieving a beneficial social impact - and the respective challenge to frame the complex value creation of social entrepreneurs into compelling and relevant value propositions towards customers. The authors build upon those findings and demonstrate within a experimental, empirical research how value propositions that focus on the social value perform superior for all tested variables connected to customer acquisition. Social entrepreneurs thus should be confident to leverage the social value they create in order to competitively position their offerings on the market and to strive for sustainable, long-term growth of their customer base.