Entrepreneurial orientation in social investing: The influence of founders and board members human capital diversity

Social enterprises (SEs) have attracted attention (Short, Moss, and Lumpkin, 2009) as they adopt economic approaches to solve social problems (Austin et al., 2006). To support their development, a social investing market, potentially worth up $1trillion by 2020 (JP Morgan, 2010), has developed. Social investing firms adopt entrepreneurial approaches by implementing venture capital practices (Scarlata and Alemany, 2010). These firms go beyond the deployment of short-term, donated capital and seek investments that ultimately create social and economic returns. The literature acknowledges the importance of individuals in starting these dual objectives firms (Mair and Marti, 2006; Scarlata, Zacharakis, Walske, 2015) and the multiple stakeholders they respond to (DiDomenico et al., 2010; Lumpkin et al. 2013). The research question this paper seeks to answer is: how does founder and stakeholder human capital influence the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of social investment firms? To answer this question, we integrate the EO framework (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996) with a resource dependence perspective (Pfeffer and Salancick, 1978) along with human capital theory (Becker, 1964) is undertaken.