Social entrepreneurship and social innovation through the lens of the value co-creation process.

In the new Era of sustainability, a sub-discipline within the field of entrepreneurship called Social Entrepreneurship (SE) emerged as a global phenomenon in the academic literature. The paper aims to understand the concept of social innovation as a strategic and dynamic aspect of social entrepreneurship. Thus, an analysis of the links between social entrepreneurship and social innovation has been carried out through the lens of the value co-creation process drawing from the Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic perspective (Vargo and Lusch, 2008; Gummesson et al., 2010) and the Network Theory (Gummesson, 2007). The study aims to understand and explain what are and how works the links between social entrepreneurial activity and innovation process. As this paper demonstrates, social entrepreneurship generate “social value” in the circumstances that the development of innovative solutions spread out through forms of collaboration between social entrepreneurs and the customer involved in the value co-creation process.