Social Entrepreneur Alliance: Collaborating to Co-create Shared Value

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to address the limitations in the IOR and Social Alliance literature with regard to the discussion on Social Entrepreneur Alliance, especially in the context of the BoP in emerging countries. An integration of Collaborative Value Creation (CVC) framework and Shared Value (SV) perspective in the literature led to the formulation of a set of propositions. A case study of a Social Entrepreneur Alliance was used to instantiate the propositions to improve the comprehension. A set of exploratory Propositions pivoted around the Social Entrepreneur Alliance link the salient constructs culled from the literature. These illuminate how and why a Social Entrepreneur Alliance could harness the power of collaborative creation of shared value to gain speed, scale and sustainability while delivering on its primary purpose and promise of social impact, especially in the face of daunting challenges that characterize the BoP context of emerging countries. The case study does not validate the propositions, but only serves to instantiate the same by providing a real-world contextual narrative. The integrated perspective and the attendant propositions could provide useful insights for a Social Entrepreneur and its social impact investors—in choosing their partners, in identifying the potential sources of value, in specifying the types of value created and in exploring and evaluating the current as well as the future opportunities for collaborative engagement. Corporates would also benefit from a deeper understanding of the dimensions of collaborative creation of shared value which could guide their CSR investment decision making.