Why and how to engage beneficiaries as co-(social) entrepreneurs? Considering hardware, software, and orgware for citizen engagement

Social entrepreneurship is typically thought of as the pursuit of a commercial activity with the primary goal to achieve societal impact. The European school of thought on social entrepreneurship emphasizes one more constituent element of social entrepreneurship namely, stakeholder engagement, especially beneficiary engagement, through organizing the decision-making as a participatory process to foster local democracy. However, there is limited research on engagement through social entrepreneurship, and this is mostly published in practitioner-oriented journals. Engaging with literature about citizen engagement in science and technology shows that these findings regarding hardware (methods, tools), software (mindset), and orgware (embedding in organizational structures and processes) can stimulate social entrepreneurship research. Both engagement processes share similar aims. The normative argument values democracy and empowerment and aims to nurture it through engagement. Instrumental and substantial arguments claim that engagement leads to better fitting and accepted innovations. In addition, implementing engagement faces similar barriers in both fields. Following the three lenses of hardware, software, and orgware, we analyse engagement in social entrepreneurship research. Concluding, we identify avenues for future research on the process of engagement and its contribution to the societal impact of the social enterprise. Future research is needed to understand how engagement practices influence the societal impact, especially local democracy, of social enterprises, and how this relationship is influenced by engagement competences of the social entrepreneur and engagement experiences of the beneficiary as well as the degree to which engagement practices are embedded in the social enterprise.