ABSTRACT
Social entrepreneurs face unique challenges in their concurrent pursuit of social and financial value creation to address intractable societal problems. Although social entrepreneurs’ actions have been highlighted as an important source of novelty and innovations, this issue has largely been under-researched so far in the field of entrepreneurship. In this paper, we explore the role of social entrepreneurs’ bricolage behavior in enabling the creation of innovations within resource-constrained environments, called ‘catalytic innovations’. In addition, we investigate situations in which an over-reliance on bricolage may hamper social entrepreneurs’ ability to look for new resources crucial to bring about social change. We tested our hypotheses on 113 social entrepreneurs using an online questionnaire survey. We find that the positive relationship between bricolage and catalytic innovations and scale/growth changes beyond a point, suggesting a curvilinear (quadratic) effect of bricolage.
