Innovation and profit motivations for social entrepreneurship: A fuzzy-set analysis

The literature on the motivation for social entrepreneurship focuses mainly on prosocial attitude. Very little research has been undertaken to understand the innovation and profit elements of social entrepreneurship. This study performs a conjoint experiment to reveal the importance of these three elements as motivators for social entrepreneurship, and then employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurations of motives, self-efficacies, and personal conditions that culminate in social entrepreneurial intention (SEI). Our results reveal asymmetric relationships between SEI and prosocial attitude, innovation attitude, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy, while profit motivation may be either high or low for SEI.