Concept development through network creation. A Case study of an innovative social venture

Objectives Literature on social enterprise has recently highlights that social innovation is a key feature of new ventures’ birth. More recently it has been suggested that a social venture’s network of relational ties plays a crucial role on its formation. We would bridge these contributions in order to shed more light on a neglected issue that is the dynamic interplay between the social venture formation and the entrepreneur’s social networks. In order to address this gap we analyse a central process of a venture formation that is the development of the new service/product concept. We investigate how a concept develops as a network of partners is progressively constituted, enlarged and changed and how concept elaboration in turn drives ties exploration. Prior work There is a growing interest in the entrepreneurship literature on social networks and how they might impact on a new venture’s formation. This stream of research highlights the relationship between the entrepreneur’s network of relationships and entrepreneurial mechanisms such opportunity recognition and resource mobilization. Recent debate in the research area of social entrepreneurship focuses on the social innovation driven by the entrepreneur, who tackles a social problem, by identifying an opportunity and providing an innovative solution to unmet social needs. The paper aims at bridging this yet separated streams of research. In order to fill this gap it analyses the concept development process at the centre of a new venture formation and investigates how this is related to the concurrent development of the entrepreneur’s network of relational ties. Approach Coherently with our research aim we adopt a qualitative approach based on a case study. We studied RM, a Not Profit Foundation, and we investigate the Radio’s formation over a three year period 2009 - 2012, from its foundation to December 2012 the 10th, when RM started to broadcast. This case study is a coherent setting for the study of the process of concept development through networking. First, RM represents a radical innovation in the field of Italian radios for children and specifically teens with special needs. Second, RM has been developed by an open approach: engaging a network of actors coming from various fields, musicians, editors, paediatricians, to create the Radio's concept. Results Our analysis, adopting a process-based approach, highlights how the concept development is strongly connected to the evolution of the interpersonal network of the entrepreneur. These ties play a key role in the concept elaboration along the early stages of the social enterprise formation. We highlight that different changes in ties are involved along the formation process, and drawing on previous classification of Elfring and Hulsink (2007) we suggests a new type of mechanisms. Moreover the case study shows that there is not a single direction causal relationship between the entrepreneur networking and new product/new venture development. The new service/product concept itself drives the search for new partners, who in turn might add new components to the concept. Finally we show that in social venture the development of the concept is reinforced but the social mission definition.