Preparing individuals for the new world of social entrepreneurship:

This paper studies the differences between social and commercial entrepreneurs. Recently some articles discussed the relevance of proper education for social entrepreneurs and the specific aspects that need to be included in social entrepreneurship education. However, the basic assumption that is underlying these arguments is that social entrepreneurs are different from regular entrepreneurs. Several studies have addressed the differences between social and commercial entrepreneurs, and some have found that they do indeed differ from each other. However, there is a lack of quantitative research on this topic and more large-scale empirical analyses is needed to support existing literature on the different characteristics of social and commercial entrepreneurs. This study attempts to contribute to existing literature by comparing both groups of entrepreneurs on several characteristics, by using a large dataset and performing a logistic regression model. Specifically, this study analyzes the following 8 variables: social mission, innovativeness, age, education, confidence in own skills, fear of failure, gender and income. The data used in this analysis comes from the Adult Population Survey (APS) carried out by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) in 2009. This survey includes a special set of questions regarding social entrepreneurship, making it very suitable for the analysis of this paper. This study finds that social entrepreneurs are indeed different from commercial entrepreneurs when they are compared on the 8 characteristics. Specifically, social entrepreneurs are found to be more driven by a social mission, are more innovative, are on average older and have a higher level of education than commercial entrepreneurs. On the other hand they are found to have lower income than commercial entrepreneurs, have equal levels of confidence in own skills and equal levels of fear of failure towards setting up their own business. Furthermore, it is found that women are equally likely to be social entrepreneurs compared to commercial entrepreneurs than men. These findings also support the underlying assumption in the social entrepreneurship education literature that social entrepreneurs are different. Therefore it seems to be justified to differentiate education for this group of entrepreneurs in order to educate potential social entrepreneurs in the right skills and characteristics.