Social Entrepreneurship Intention as a Driver of Dealing Socio-Economic Challenges: An Emerging Economy Perspective

Social entrepreneurs mobilize opportunity recognition, market linkages, blended finance, capacity building, and digital platforms to create sustainable, scalable solutions for socioeconomic challenges in an economy. It is essential to address the drivers that help to deal with the socio-economic challenges of an economy. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the key determinants influencing social entrepreneurship intention among university students that helps in dealing socio-economic challenges. In this study, a recent survey was conducted and collected 354 responses from different universities in Bangladesh. Among them 276 highly relevant respondents were used for empirical analysis. This study used SEM-Neural Network approach to analysis the empirical data. Initially, SEM was used to determine the factors that have significant influence on the social entrepreneurship intention. Then, neural network was used to rank the statistically significant predictors derived from SEM results. Besides, importance performance map analysis (IPMA) was used for determining the factor with immense significance, but with a meagre performance score. The empirical findings depict that perceived behavioural control has the utmost significant effect on social entrepreneurship intention, followed by perceived self-efficacy, empathy towards others, and subjective norms. Further, IPMA shows that perceived behaviour control is the highest significant construct but has the low-performance score. This research will extend the literature of entrepreneurship by representing significant determinants influencing the social entrepreneurial intention among university students. This study developed an integrated model, which will consider taking effective decisions in this domain. Bangladesh is a developing country with many social concerns that social entrepreneurs may solve. Therefore, the insights from these empirical results will provide better understanding to the concerned people.