Social entrepreneurship and sustainability - Understanding the context and key characteristics

This research article presents sustainable model system based framework derived from the scholarly investigation into the existent research literature on social entrepreneurship. The social entrepreneurship is emerging as a viable alternative to the traditional institutional setups for making a sustainable impact and reach towards the underserved needs of the low-income population living in the developing economies. The existing research on social entrepreneurship lacks focus on creating an integrated framework thereby posing a limitation to the entry, growth and penetration of the social entrepreneurship based market setup. The sustainable model system comprises a combination of the constraining conditions and key choices. The constraining conditions include the environmental and firm-specific constraints like need addressed, mission type and socio-economic objectives. The relative impact and significance of the key choices vary for different social enterprises depending upon the applicable constraining conditions.