Serving rural low‐income markets through a social entrepreneurship approach: Venture creation and growth

Abstract

Research Summary: Rural communities in developing countries often exhibit high poverty levels, lack of skilled labor, and limited infrastructure. Through an analysis of three social ventures serving rural low-income markets in Latin America, we explore how social entrepreneurs create and grow their ventures. We advance a multilevel framework that incorporates three main levels within the creation and growth process of social ventures serving these markets. At the individual level, founders are continuously revising goals and acquiring new capabilities. At the community-relations level, they engage in explicit efforts to ground business operations in the community. At the organizational level, they pursue innovative business models. These processes are dynamic and interdependent. This framework contributes to the research on social venture creation and growth in uncertain and resource-constrained environments.Managerial Summary: Philanthropy or base of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives by multinational corporations have sought to alleviate poverty in rural low-income communities in developing countries. Social entrepreneurship constitutes an alternative mechanism to generate social impact by bringing products and services to this market segment in a financially sustainable way. However, the creation and growth of a social venture in this context pose multiple challenges given the socioeconomic conditions of its

Empreendedorismo feminino na economia criativa e seus desafios: um olhar sobre as competências

“…O artigo faz um avanço na literatura de empreendedorismo feminino na economia criativa. Primeiro, estende o conhecimento sobre a criação de novos empreendimentos criativos (Davidsson & Gruenhagen, 2021;Prado et al, 2022;Shepherd et al, 2021), uma área de investigação que ajuda as mulheres empreendedoras a superar as barreiras em que o treinamento e a educação têm, entre outras coisas, um efeito positivo na superação de barreiras na gestão do seu próprio negócio criativo (Molina-López et al, 2021). O empreendedorismo feminino é um motor de inclusão social (Rahman et al, 2021).…”

Revenue Drift, Incentives, and Effort Allocation in Social Enterprises

“…4 When making decisions in the field, loan o cers in commercial microfinance organizations must balance loan size, interest rate, repayment risk, and potential profits on one hand, with reaching the target underprivileged population on the other (Battilana and Dorado, 2010;Pache and Santos, 2010;Canales, 2014;Wry and Zhao, 2018). 'Base of the pyramid' firm employees must sell products at prices above cost, yet within the reach of the target population (Santos et al, 2015;McMullen and Bergman, 2017;Prado et al, 2022). Finally, environmental social enterprise employees must balance e orts to increase sales with costly ecological protection measures (York et al, 2016).…”

Transforming the Creative and Social Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: The Broker Roles of Rural Collaborative Workspaces

“…In rural areas, typically, many of these social enterprises engaged in creative industries are micro and small businesses [23], in the form of one-person enterprises, small studios, or small cooperatives. They often have limited profit and resource networks [24,25]. With the emergence of rural collaborative workspaces (hereinafter CWSs), some of the creative social enterprises have started joining them to obtain support, e.g., the provision of offices, activity space, or other types of resource management.…”