RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

How to create a social enterprise: a case study 221
Shah and Tripsas (2007) also set four propositions for conditions when user entrepreneurship
is more likely to dominate classic sources of entrepreneurship. First, when user provides
enjoyment opposed to solely economic benefit. Second, when users have relatively low opportunity
costs. Third, when industry is small scale, niche with high variety of demand and peripheral.
And finally fourth, when market is turbulent, product is new, there are high levels of
uncertainty and evolving user needs.
The user entrepreneurship models takes in to account interaction among different actors
that Korsgaard (2011) identified important for social entrepreneurship. User involvement is
emphasized by Svensson and Bengtsson (2010), who showed through their two case studies
that people with social problems can innovate new social services for themselves. They concluded
that the superior knowledge about the problems and solutions possessed by users could
explain the varying frequencies between service types (such as banking services, surgical
instruments or social services) of user generated innovations. They also found that legitimacy
played significant role in this process. Internal legitimacy within the group helps to diffuse
the social venture and make it attractive to potential users of its services. External legitimacy
of the venture is dependent of project leaders and organisations. (Svensson & Bengtsson 2010).
Methodology
A qualitative single case study methodology was selected to report the studied process
and its results. Yin (2009) defines a case study as an empirical inquiry that investigates a phenomenon
within its real-life context. The main reason for using the case study approach is
the desire to understand particularly complex phenomena either by learning something about
the case itself or by using the case to achieve a more general understanding (Stake, 1995;
Yin, 2009). Within management studies, the case study approach has traditionally been used,
especially when there has been a need for new theory development (see e.g. Eisenhardt, 1989).
The research project started when the first author of this paper was contacted and asked,
if researchers could provide expertise concerning participatory business idea generation. Data
was therefore collected from a real-life process between autumn 2012- spring 2014. Data consisted
researchers observations from pre-board meetings and idea generation workshops and
they were recorded as a field notes. Besides these events, there were frequent informal interaction
with key informants, namely the pre-board members. Through this interaction updates
about recent events were received, researchers observations were discussed and validated.
These were also recorded as field notes. Blog texts, project presentations and evaluation report
produced by informants were included to data. The quantitative description of data is presented
in table 1.