From cowboys to diplomats : why the growth of social entrepreneurship requires a different attitude than its creation

Social entrepreneurship – a set of innovative business models that combine a social goal with a business approach – is in a transitional phase, from a „cowboy market¿ to a more established market niche. This process results in two interconnected dilemmas for the social entrepreneur. Firstly, how it can capture market share despite its role as an antagonist to current market values. Secondly, how it can prevent the loss of its own core values in the course of greater interaction with the incumbent business and civil society regimes. Using a tool known from innovation sciences to analyse radical innovations, namely strategic niche management, and both survey data (57 cases) and interviews with actors in the Netherlands, this paper shows that social entrepreneurs have an attitude that is still more in line with the cowboy market than with the new diplomatic role they are expected to take on. Most importantly, social entrepreneurs reject a definition of their activities, and many actors displaying social entrepreneurial behaviour will in fact not auto-identify with the phrase. Because the pioneers in the field fail to agree upon the core values that drive them, social entrepreneurs cannot effectively communicate with actors from the competing business and civil society regimes, leading to misunderstanding, distrust and a shortage of investors. However, the diverse set of survey respondents were found to display several shared characteristics, implying that identifying the social entrepreneurs¿ core values should be feasible. This paper proposes that social entrepreneurs should be encouraged to focus on and describe what they share instead of how they differ, since doing so will enable them to gain a larger market share without unknowingly compromising what is important to them