The critical success factors of social entrepreneurship in India: an empirical study

摘要

The paper describes the social entrepreneurship (S-ENT) critical success factors (CSFs) identified from a survey study carried out in India. The ranking analysis of the survey results shows that 28 factors are rated as critical for determining the S-ENT success of a social enterprise. Further, the factor analysis revealed that the identified CSFs can be grouped into seven clusters, namely leadership, social enterprise planning, community engagement, innovative financing, human capital, legal support, and social enterprise marketing. The outcome of the thesis provides pioneering insights through a structured framework for investigating the individual CSFs and their different levels of contribution to S-ENT success. The inventive knowledge generated out of the thesis work, can be specifically fruitful for practitioners and other stakeholders in identifying the areas of their social enterprise functioning that demand their utmost priority and attention, in identifying the skills and resources required for their venture success, in assessing their competitive advantage and in helping to setup evaluation mechanism of their ventures etc. The pioneering insights can also be utilised by academicians for theory building and further analysis in the field.