Empirical studies show that women tend to shy away from competition against men, especially in male-typed domains. Social entrepreneurship is such a competitive domain. Yet female engagement in social entrepreneurship would be desirable and important from a societal perspective. With the help of two experiments, we investigate whether offering female-only competitions can be an effective means to foster social innovation by encouraging more women to enter competition and thereby increasing market entry and overall social performance. Our results highlight the importance of the perception of the context (female- vs. male-typed) for the effectiveness of affirmative action. While women showed no difference in competitiveness between same- and mixed-gender tournaments for a female-typed task (developing a social business idea), offering female-only competitions drove more women into competition when confronted with a male-typed task (solving mazes). The latter was true for competitions featuring selfish rather than altruistic incentives. Hence, female-only competitions are particularly useful in male-typed contexts featuring selfish incentives, such as generally encountered in entrepreneurial competition. Since men also showed no adverse reactions to the affirmative action of female-only competitions, these competitions improved efficiency overall.

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an important means of addressing grand challenges. Although research on the topic has accelerated, scholars have yet to articulate an overarching framework that links the different pathways taken by social entrepreneurs with the positive effects of these efforts. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a systematic literature review which enabled us to conceptually differentiate between social value and social change as distinct outcomes of social entrepreneurship and identify seven pathways for achieving these outcomes. Building on our analysis, we outline a research agenda for questions pertaining to: the dynamics between social value and social change; how contextual factors and social entrepreneurs influence various pathways; design principles of business models and innovations that facilitate social value and social change; and defining, measuring, and ensuring countability for social value and social change

Researchers and practitioners increasingly consider social innovation a market-based means to address social challenges. However, to fully harness the potential benefits of social innovation for society, we need to understand its drivers and value creation mechanisms. Specifically, we need to understand why individuals engage in social innovation (micro level), how they influence the social innovation process (meso level) and how this relates to social value creation (macro level). However, research is scattered across different fields so that links between levels of analysis remain unclear. We conducted a systematic literature review including 460 articles across different research fields to understand: (1) how key antecedents of individuals enable socially innovative behavior; (2) when and under what conditions socially innovative behavior leads to successful social innovations (connecting the micro and the meso level); (3) what key mechanisms of social innovation stimulate social value creation and social change (connecting the meso and macro level); and (4) what facilitating mechanisms enable individual innovators to address social challenges (connecting the micro and macro level). We develop an integrative model of the social innovation process, review the state of the art on social entrepreneurship and social innovation research, outline prevailing research gaps, formulate theoretical implications, and provide a future research agenda.