| Author(s), Year | Definition |
| Austin, Stevenson, & Wei-Skillern (2006)3 | Innovative, social value creating activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit, business, or government sectors (p. 2). |
| Brinckerhoff (2000)4 | Social entrepreneurs have the following characteristics: - They are willing to take reasonable risk on behalf of the people their organization serves;
- They are constantly looking for new ways to serve their constituencies, and to add value to existing services;
- They understand that all resource allocations are really stewardship investments;
- They weigh social and financial return of each of these investments;
- They understand the difference between needs and wants; and
- They always keep the mission first, but know that without the money, there is no mission output (p. 12).
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| Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (2008)5 | Innovative and resourceful approaches to addressing social problems. These approaches could be pursued through for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid organizations. |
| Dees (1998)6 | Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector, by: - adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value);
- recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission;
- engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning;
- acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand;
- exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created (p. 4).
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| Frumkin (2002)7 | Social entrepreneurs have a combination of the supply-side orientation and the instrumental rationale, providing a vehicle for entrepreneurship that creates enterprises that combine commercial and charitable goals (p. 130). |
| Light (2006a)8 | A social entrepreneur is an individual, group, network, organization, or alliance of organizations that seeks sustainable, large-scale change through pattern-breaking ideas in what governments, nonprofits, and businesses do to address significant social problems or how they do it. |
| Martin & Osberg (2007)9 | Social entrepreneurship has the following three components. - Identifying a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve any transformative benefit on its own.
- Identifying an opportunity in this unjust equilibrium, developing a social value proposition, and bringing to bear inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude, thereby challenging the stable stateās hegemony.
- Forging a new, stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or alleviates the suffering of the targeted group, and through imitation and the creation of a stable ecosystem around the new equilibrium ensuring a better future for the targeted group and even society at large (p. 35).
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| Mort, Weerawardena, & Carnegie (2003)10 | - Social entrepreneurs are first driven by the social mission of creating better social value than their competitors which results in them exhibiting entrepreneurially virtuous behavior.
- They exhibit a balanced judgment, a coherent unity of purpose, and action in the face of complexity.
- Social entrepreneurs explore and recognize opportunities to create better social value for their clients.
- Social entrepreneurs display innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk taking propensity in their key decision making process.
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| Peredor & McLean (2006)11 | Social entrepreneurship is exercised where a person or group: - aims at creating social value, either exclusively or at least in some prominent way;
- shows a capacity to recognize and take advantage of opportunities to create value;
- employs innovation, ranging from outright invention to adapting someone elseās novelty, in creating and/or distributing social value;
- is willing to accept an above average degree of risk in creating and disseminating social value; and
- is unusually resourceful in being relatively undaunted by scarce assets in pursuing their social venture (p. 64).
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| Pomerantz (2003)12 | Social entrepreneurship can be defined as the development of innovative, mission-supporting, earned income, job creating or licensing ventures undertaken by individual social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, or nonprofits in association with for-profits (p. 25). |
| Thompson, Alvy, & Lees (2000)13 | Social entrepreneurs are people who realize where there is an opportunity to satisfy some unmet need that the state welfare will not meet, and who gather together the necessary resources (generally people, often volunteers, money, and premises) and use these to āmake a differenceā (p. 328). |
| Young (1986)14 | Nonprofit entrepreneurs are the innovators who found new organizations, develop and implement new programs and methods, organize and expand new services, and redirect the activities of faltering organizations (p. 162). |
