Social entrepreneurship based on unmet personal needs: a closer investigation of how lead user chracteristics influence the business development process and social mission of latent social entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs are said to be innovative change agents that create social impact in various industries. Little is known about the specific knowledge endowments they use in starting their business. To provide more insight into the entrepreneurial process of social entrepreneurs, we used elements from the lead user innovation literature. We argue that a personal unmet social need can create a lead user status that can trigger the user innovation process, which has social entrepreneurship as a result. We used a mixed method research design where we combined survey data with interview data. We tested our hypothesis using the Kolmogorov Smirnov test, the Mann-Whitney. Our preliminary findings are that the lead users differ from the non-lead users on three elements, which were having a unmet personal need, being ahead of trend (self-perceived) and the relative importance of their organization’s economic objectives. Since we are in the middle of our data collection process future research needs to examine the mechanisms at work to explain our findings.