Social Entrepreneurship Intentions Among Business Students in Oman

Social Entrepreneurship Education

Dees (1998), recognized a social entrepreneur as change agents who relentlessly strive at creating and sustaining social value. Austin et al., (2006) defined social entrepreneurship as “social entrepreneurship as innovative, social value creating activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit, business, or government sectors”. The identification, appraisal, and exploitation of possibilities that contribute to social value, rather than private or stockholder gain, is what social entrepreneurship is all about (Certo & Miller, 2008). A social entrepreneur is thus a person who intends to generate profit by way of risk taking and innovation for the society as a whole or a particular segment of it. Altruism is at the heart of a social entrepreneur (Tan et al., 2015).

Integrating courses related to social entrepreneurship into the present curriculum of colleges and universities is of utmost importance. Introducing social entrepreneurship in higher education would go a long way in creating awareness among student fraternity about various social issues that demands immediate attention, make them more responsive to the problems faced by community members by bringing out creative solutions to such problems, in addition to them becoming more knowledgeable in expressing their opinions to already available solutions in hand (Roslan et al., 2020).