Social Entrepreneur Quotient: An International Perspective on Social Entrepreneur Personalities

Abstract

As the field of social entrepreneurship expands, so will demand for education, support services, and finance to facilitate these activities. Rigorous tools for evaluating social ventures’ potential, and founders’ capabilities, will be required. The Social Entrepreneur Quotient (SEQ) is a psychometric scale encompassing six dimensions: creativity, ethics, openness to change, risk-taking, autonomy, and achievement motivation. Through SEQ testing of an international sample of participants in a massive open online course on social enterprise, this paper places in conversation the significance of individual social entrepreneur traits and the contextually embedded nature of social enterprise in the Global North and South.

Keywords:

• social entrepreneurship
• personality
• psychometrics
• socio-economic development
• Global North and South

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Isabel Salovaara for critical and outstanding contributions to this research project and express immense gratitude for her conceptual and editorial support. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Shilpi Sharma and Dr. Sanjeev Sahni for critical conceptual, technical and moral support at the early stages of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note

Notes

1 The survey prompted respondents with the Securities and Exchange Board of India definition of a social venture: A social venture is defined as a trust, society, company, venture capital undertaking or limited liability partnership formed with the purpose of promoting social welfare or solving social problems or providing social benefits. However, within the context of the course, survey participants would have read and discussed multiple understandings of social enterprise, all grounded in the idea of using market mechanisms to promote social or environmental ends.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) with a grant from the JGU research grant committee.