RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Social entrepreneurship and co-creation for sustainable business 239
is different from mass collaboration (such as YouTube) because of the two-way flow between
the organization and the participant.
Individuals not directly involved in the co-creation process may benefit from products and
services developed by those that do participate (fig. 1). For their part, organizations can absorb
learning from the co-creation space, but only if the knowledge generated with consumers is
shared inside the organization.
Some research shows that what is needed to achieve good sustainable development practices
is: (1) a mix of social entrepreneurship and management capacity, and (2) institutional
innovation, in terms of implementation of new networks, which are understood as polycentric
and decentered processes of collective decision (co-decision) and action (co-creation) (Barrutiaa
& Echebarria, 2012). In effect, the principles of social entrepreneurship, which
establishes a bond between the business and social groups, and co-creation, which also brings
together individual needs and thus supports the business units in the process of value creation,
could be brought together to provide grounds for introducing new hybrid categories
for further research. Here we propose that this interrelation could be identified on three levels
– individual, organizational and communal (fig 1). Thus, the entrepreneurial efforts could
be basically attributed to the level of the organization (business unit), the social element is
inherent in satisfying community and individual needs, and the co-creator functions as an intermediary
between all three levels.
Figure 1: Participants in the co-creation process – own model
Hence, Figure 1 demonstrates the interaction of three major categories of participants in
the co-creation process, which we suggest to distinguish as the category of the individual cocreator,
the social co-creator, and the community co-creator. All of them can be found in the
area where the three circles intersect in the suggested Venn diagram.
The individual co-creator is so far the most commonly discussed category in existing literature
on co-creation. This is the person who establishes a connection between the business
unit (the organization) and the consumers. Individual co-creators could interact as single company
advisors or in networking initiatives. They are typical representatives of the businessto-client
relation in the process of value creation.
The next category, the social co-creator could be defined as the one who creates social
value for the community through interaction with for-profit and non-for-profit organizations.