Resources slack for social entrepreneurship: the genesis of social and strategic growth options

This conceptual paper contributes to tackle some main research gaps in social entrepreneurship studies. Precisely, from the literature analysis it emerges that: i) prior scholars provides vague definitions of the concept of social entrepreneurship, so that it is hard to clearly categorize one new venture as an initiative with a specific social purpose, ii) mostly, scholars relegates social entrepreneurship to the area of non-profit initiatives, but this conceptualization contrasts with the observation of the real world, iii) there are almost none previous attempts to investigating the formation of growth options in the field of the social entrepreneurship. Current work tries to fulfill such gaps by interpreting social entrepreneurship as a business model innovation, by focusing on for-profit new ventures, and by explaining the mechanism of the formation of growth options in light of resources slack.