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Digital social entrepreneurship: Balancing social and commercial goals in an Indian ‘fintech’ organisation

conference contribution
posted on 2018-07-12, 08:54 authored by Silvia Masiero, M.N. Ravishankar
Digital social entrepreneurship (DSE) is the entrepreneurial work of social ventures centred on digital technologies. Despite the potential of DSE to contribute to solving global societal challenges, limited knowledge is available on how it balances the social and commercial goals that characterise social entrepreneurship. Drawing on case study evidence from a platform for digital microfinance in India, the paper finds two coexisting goal-balancing strategies for DSE: first, it deploys a set of digital capabilities aimed at reaching financial sustainability in the long term. Second, it combines these with field immersion capabilities, which are instrumental to maintaining the embeddedness of organisations in their local communities. Revealing digitally-enabled solutions to the problem of balancing competing goals, the paper generates new theory on the role of the digital in social entrepreneurship, and draws practical implications for this to contribute to tackling poverty and vulnerability on a world scale.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

EGOS - European Group for Organizational Studies

Citation

MASIERO, S. and RAVISHANKAR, M.N., 2018. Digital social entrepreneurship: Balancing social and commercial goals in an Indian ‘fintech’ organisation. Presented at the 34th EGOS Colloquium: Surprise in and around Organizations: Journeys to the Unexpected, Tallinn, Estonia, July 5–7th.

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-02-14

Publication date

2018

Notes

This paper is in closed access.

Language

  • en

Location

Tallinn, Estonia