Producing Visions of Entrepreneurship in the Opportunity Spaces for Social Innovations

Abstract

Entrepreneurship, conceived either as a functional attribute, or as a practical factor for material progress, has been growing by the searches for being different in the processes of value creation. All along the practical ways of forward progression, entrepreneurship has been scaling through the multiple opportunities for creating change .The process of entrepreneurship unfolds to new operations and impact, by the nurturing spaces in the contemporary commercial and social worlds. Social innovation is a fertile opportunity space for the social mould of entrepreneurship. The concept as well as practices of entrepreneurship, has been accommodating structural modifications and functional extensions, quite in tune with the changing entrepreneurial compositions and orientations. Both conventional andmodern business models hold innovation as an essential role component and process ingredient. From the commercial world of a usual entrepreneur, innovation has moved on to energise the social world of an unusual entrepreneur. This socially constructive mode is fully consistent with the conception that entrepreneurship itself becomes unique when generated and actualized by the drives for the Unusuals. Its distinctive expression is social entrepreneurship, which carries a substantive mix of affiliative and economic motivations. Social entrepreneurship gains qualitative additions, when driven in the fertile plane of social innovations. Social innovations represent the creation and application of meaningful solutions to social problems. These hold opportunity spaces that can turn the entire process cycle of entrepreneurship, ranging fromidea origination to implementation. All along the reaches of social innovations, lies the potential to generate and realise visions of entrepreneurship. This paper focuses on the opportunity spaces in social innovations, for producing visions of entrepreneurship. Its objectives are twofold- analysing the conceptual and theoretical moulds of social innovations, with the aim of locating the opportunity spaces for producing visions of entrepreneurship and examining an empirical context where the visions of entrepreneurship are produced in the opportunity spaces of social innovations. The former proceeds through conceptual and theoretical reasons; the latter is done by focusing on a single case of the Kanthari International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs and Innovators, located in Thiruvananthapuram in the state of Kerala.