Scaling up social innovation for sustainability: The roles of social enterprise capabilities

Abstract

The scaling of social innovation is an important issue in social enterprises for sustainability. The scenario is due to the social enterprise capabilities to ensure the social program’s impact on society to become wider and deeper. Thus, social innovation helps to identify the social problems and target actions to address the social complex problems by social enterprise capabilities. This study investigates the factors of social enterprise capabilities in enhancing social innovation for sustainabil-ity and for eliminating the social barriers. In addition, the study discusses the relationship between social enterprise capabilities to scale social innovation. The study uses cross-sectional design and collects the necessary data from 136 social enterprises in Malaysia for the survey. The findings show that social enterprise capabilities for earning generation, replicating, and stimulating had a positive relationship with scaling social innovation when the level of significance was 0.05. Accordingly, the social enterprise owners are required to improve their capabilities to reach a higher scale of social innovation for growth and sustainability.

Keywords

• Social enterprise capabilities
• Scaling
• Social innovation
• Social problem