How social tech ventures develop to deliver their mission.

The world is facing many social problems. Social entrepreneurship offers the promise to be an important tool in the fight against them. Social tech ventures, which leverage technology and trade commercially to address social problems, are particularly promising in this regard: by offering technologically-mediated solutions to social problems, they have the potential to help a larger number of beneficiaries at lower costs than their non-tech counterparts.

Existing research about social entrepreneurship has shown that social ventures need to carefully combine the two aspects that are at the core of their hybrid nature: i.e., their social and commercial elements. In addition, research has found important ways by which social ventures can deal with this challenge, such as by integrating these two elements in the organization or segregating them in different parts of it.

Despite its strong merits in recent years, this literature overlooks how the distinct type of social tech ventures develop to deliver their mission at scale. First, most research on social ventures is based on non-tech ventures and does not explore the distinct dynamics that social tech ventures face. In turn, the small number of studies on social tech ventures have not explored how these ventures develop over time to achieve their mission at scale.

As a result, we lack an understanding of how social tech ventures develop and how they overcome the challenges that they face. Second, research on social ventures has to date overlooked the important question of how social tech ventures evolve to achieve scale. Whereas this is a major objective for the world of social innovation practice, research has to date not examined systematically what process social tech ventures can employ to scale themselves and the social impact that they create for beneficiaries.

Third, research on commercial ventures has started to explore how new ventures can pivot when their original approach fails but we lack research about how social ventures can pivot. This is a formidable challenge given that pivoting for social (tech) ventures likely not only involves overhauling their business models but also their approach for delivering impact.

My project aims to push the frontier of social venture research by systematically analyzing how social tech ventures develop to deliver their mission at scale, such as by scaling, pivoting and mitigating mission drift. In this approach, I connect to an emerging body of research that is starting to theorize how new (non-social) ventures scale and pivot, as well as how social ventures respond to mission drift.

These are all fundamental aspects of how social tech ventures develop in their pursuit of their mission, yet we lack research about the process by which they do so. I aim to bring to the surface the unwritten 'user manual' of developing social tech ventures at scale and uncovering the different paths that are more or less conductive for achieving this.

A better understanding of how social tech ventures develop to deliver their mission at scale is critical to help them and the wider social innovation ecosystem to deliver the next generation of social innovations that can address major social problems in an extensive and widely-accessible manner. Building on successful collaborations with key organizations from the social innovation ecosystem, in the proposed study I will work with an existing research partner who is a leader in supporting and developing social tech ventures.

I will rely on a novel toolkit of data collection methods, including founder journaling, extensive (offline and online) observation and interviews, to obtain longitudinal data. The research partner plays an active role in the study from its design to the final stage, when we will discuss implications for social innovation practice.