**1. Introduction**

The research in the field of entrepreneurship has expanded to include a wide variety of entrepreneurial phenomena over the past 4 decades, ranging from the conventional or business entrepreneurship ([1, 2]; Kizner, 1973) to social entrepreneurship [3–7]. There are different facets of entrepreneurship today and entrepreneurship scholars and practitioners have not

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

yet agreed on a common definition, typology and entrepreneurship theories. Similarly, in spite of the growing amount of attraction and popularity in social entrepreneurship, scholars and practitioners, there still remains great amount of ambiguity as to what a social entrepreneur is and does. Within social entrepreneurship, common concepts and ontology that provides understanding of social venturing entrepreneurship have emerged. These ontologies and concepts in turn help to define the role of social venturing entrepreneur and investor or philanthropist in a social venturing and co-operative entrepreneurship (SVCE) business model enterprise, and appropriate supporting SVE economic theories.

**3. Social venturing entrepreneurship ontology**

ing terms and their definitions.

**3.1. Social venturing entrepreneurship (SVE)**

**3.2. The social venturing entrepreneur**

**3.3. SVE: social investor**

Social entrepreneurship has become ambiguous, because all sorts of activities are now being called social entrepreneurship. The proponents of SVE have generally agreed on the follow-

A Practical and Theoretical Approach to Social Venturing Entrepreneurship

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72011

85

Social venturing entrepreneurship is defined as the contribution to solving wicked societal problems by entrepreneurial methods [8]. It was Adam Smith, who once stated that moral sentiments and virtues are the forces that result in entrepreneurship with the aim to contribute to solving the problems of society. The market mechanism—invisible hand, as Smith coined the concept, was just to avoid partiality, which favors one person above the other. The market ought to be impartial in Smith's view as it is just an efficient coordination mechanism [12–14].

A social venturing entrepreneur is a Schumpeterian [2], Von Mises [9, 15–17], Kirznerian (1973), Knight [1] entrepreneur, a Smithian [12] economist and a Raiffeisenian (1818–1888) social reformer ([18]: pp. 170–172, [8]: p. 42). A social venturing entrepreneur is a creator of effective social change in a context of economic, social and political conditions and masters the skills of *networking* and *lobbying* [19]. Just as entrepreneurship is a creative action to explore and find opportunities within the boundaries of actual conditions, social, political, commercial, business, practical and technological, for Dijk et al. [8, 20], social venturing entrepreneur applies entrepreneurship and investments in a business-minded and entrepreneurial approach to societal problems in areas where the market is functioning poorly or lacking. The social investors and entrepreneurs do invest in society via products and services to stimulate people toward independence and self-sustaining—economically and socially—in an entrepreneurial way. As such, social venturing entrepreneurship has an advantage above conventional entrepreneurship as it reintroduces the concept of entrepreneurship as a calling and nothing less than a (silent) revolution in mainstream entrepreneurship ([7]: p. 70, [21]).

This type of entrepreneurial behavior is current and commonly exhibited by entrepreneurs who benefited from the first successful development phase of their entrepreneurial life cycle. They got attention for society's problems and want to establish, individually or cooperatively a social venture, as a matter of significance, by solving these issues in an entrepreneurial way, drawing on their entrepreneurial talent, persistence, networks and finance. These social ventures are very much driven by a clear vision of solving societal issues anywhere in the world. The social investor applies social innovation by setting up social venture investments, thereby bringing ideas into sustainable practice in solving societal problems, especially where the

market and public sector have failed to tackle social challenges [8, 20–22].

Consequently, this chapter has been written in order to explain the practical and theoretical approach in relation to the concepts, common ontologies, the social venturing entrepreneur, social venturing and co-operative entrepreneurship business model, social venturing economics that help to explain, predict, analyze the behavior of economic actors as they perform their activities and practical applicability of social venturing entrepreneurship using appreciative inquiry.
