RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

226 RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP
enthusiastic and entrepreneurial people had to be found from among the rehabilitees – not
from the organisations and among their employees.
Community interaction
Besides the open pre-board meetings, the idea generation phase consisted four public workshops
(see figure 3). In workshops, all emerging or existing ideas for business were collected.
If someone came to workshop with an idea, it was written to a post-it note and placed to a
“wall of ideas”. Otherwise, ideas were generated in the workshops. Method-wise, the idea
generation process followed user co-creation and participatory design domains in Living lab
methodology landscape (Pallot et al., 2011) and relied strongly on socio-emotional intelligence.
Social and emotional intelligence refers to the competencies linked to self-awareness,
self-management and social awareness. The methodological starting point was to focus on
participants own strengths and meaningful experiences of work. By doing so, the diversity
and heterogeneity of participants backgrounds and skills could brought to use (Shah & Tripsas,
2007; Autio et al., 2013). Thus, the potential employees were guided and supported to
generate first-person opportunities (Autio et al., 2013) instead of scanning outside opportunities
or possibilities for someone else.
Concept development
Two ideas proceeded to concept development phase but only one proceeded further and
caused entrepreneurial action during the time period under investigation. The idea that survived
was very much tied to the community members’ own experiences as patients and rehabilitees
and thus, improved the current services. This corresponds to Autio et al., (2013) as
their study suggests that use information is important to stimulate entrepreneurial action. Therefore,
it was no surprise that this idea prompted entrepreneurial action among individuals from
the community. A team of four people was found among the community of rehabilitees and
they developed the concept further. This also meant shift in management of the process. The
team took over and the initiator together with the pre-board stepped aside. This event presents
transformation where the project became more focused.
Public interaction
As distinction to Shah and Tripsas (2007) model, there were different kind of public interaction
models. Through the public interaction, the venture process was introduced for local
authorities and for local entrepreneurial community: Science- and Business Park, City council
and Centre for Economic development, transport and the environment (TE), to name but
a few. This was done in order to raise awareness about the social problem and about the social
enterprises in general. The feedback received was mainly positive although one authority
doubted the concept of social enterprise saying “These ventures usually are not viable…”
These interactions however brought the process to the awareness of local entrepreneurial environment
(Audretsch and Keilbach, 2004) and gained acceptance locally.
In concept development phase, the selected team utilized business model canvas (Osterwalder
and Pigneur, 2009) in order to shape the offering. The team chose to visit one of the
researchers, who had a strong background in business but had been absent from the idea generation
workshop phase, to test their ideas and to have feedback about the planned venture.
Public exposure took place as the service was introduced and piloted together with a potential
paying customer, the local mental health service unit (open ward). This unit was very