Characteristics of social entrepreneur: an explorative analysis

Objectives. This study focuses on social ventures as for-profit organizations which bases their survival on social legitimacy and generates a social value, by employing usually marginalized categories of individuals. Specifically, this paper study main characteristics of starting a business in case entrepreneurs hails from a disadvantaged group of people. Methodology. We use a an extremely large-scale sample, at worldwide level, including 1563 observations. The time span covers the period 2004-2018. We investigates main characteristics of starting a business considering census (low and low-medium income) of the founder and gender. We perform one-way Anova and correlation statistics. Findings. Our results confirms that, despite policy makers efforts, underdog individuals still have poor possibilities of starting a business because of capital required. Difficulties are greater for womenthan for men. Research limits. The main limits of the analysis are the small number of variables used to investigate social ventures and the explorative method, which does not allow to detect causal relationships. Practical implications. At a macro-level, the paper shows that policies for incentivizing social entrepreneurship and social development are still scarcely effective. Originality of the study. This contribution extends the knowledge in a field of research which is rather new. We originally contribute by digging to light that differences in gender are a poor explanation for social entrepreneurship. Findings are largely reliable because the massive number and time-coverage of observations. Routinely collected observations are deemed to be less biased than cross-sectional analysis. Thus, the study detects a salient path in social entrepreneurship.