The purpose of our research is to highlight evidence from the recent dynamics of social incubation. Social enterprises have been increasingly seen as crucial actors to tackle the environmental and social challenges of our age. Over the past years, alongside the growth of Social Entrepreneurship sector, a lack of support mechanisms to the development of Social Enterprises has been discussed, making the creation of incubators that establish a set of services and specific resources for the sector ever so important (Perrini, 2004). Drawing on and embracing terminology from general entrepreneurship, social incubation − which seems to be very common in the grey literature − is a set of resources aimed at helping social entrepreneurs to develop their enterprises.
Even though there is a similarity to regular incubation, to have a niche with the same thoughts and values will make social enterprises evolve faster, thus people will develop specific systemic approaches for their business (Casanova and Bruno, 2013).
Previous studies have acknowledged that general incubators – both general and social - are not only providers of services and infrastructure, but rather institutions that brings together support activities and resources from a network of individuals and organizations in order to assist a new enterprise development.
However, the incubation of social enterprises has the potential to trigger a wider social change also developing a strong role in the spread of social impact, few studies have been developed about the subject. While the field of incubation of social enterprises gains maturity, a lot of the best practices remains unproven.
In that sense, our research intends to explore these new dynamics, evidencing what we can learn from these propitious environments of support and development. This papers aims to provide an overview of the academic literature on the incubation of social enterprises. The contribution of this paper lies in identifying the existing gaps in the academic literature regarding the modus operandi and efficiency of social incubators.
Furthermore, this literature review aims to sketch out interesting avenues for further research on this recent phenomenon, such as: assuming the potentialities of it, can a social incubation real provide higher synergies between the Social Enterprises? Would be they enabling the co-creation of businesses? As we said, the discussion about incubation of social enterprises is still very young in the academia and we intend to further the academic discussion in this field.
Casanova, G., Bruno, A. (2013). Scaling Social Ventures: An Exploratory Study of Social Incubators and Accelerators Journal of Management for Global Sustainability, 2, 173–197
Perrini, F. (Ed.) (2006). The new social entrepreneurship: What awaits social entrepreneurship ventures? Edward Elgar Pub.
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
