Creating equal opportunities through social entrepreneurship: The case of future is brighter youth platform

Giving priority to creating value for sustainable development rather than accepting the dominance of the profit-centered perspective has been gaining more momentum. Within this changing perspective, social entrepreneurs are the most notable group, whose innovative initiatives create valuable contributions by becoming pioneer forces required for economic and social development. Further, their efforts in showing the significance of social value creation result in a new business model, “social business.” Although the social business shares some common features with the traditional business, the social business differentiates itself by acting as a social change actor accompanied by a socially sensitive mission, a hybrid flexible design, innovative ways of finding/using resources for creating new solutions to needs. Thereby, this study aims to understand the features of social business models together with their contribution to social inclusion and creating equal opportunities for all in terms of a developing country context

Universities’ contributions to sustainable development’s social challenge: a case study of a social innovation practice

There is an increasing recognition that dealing with sustainable development need to address the social structures that encourage unsustainable economic and environmental practices. Universities represent important sources of knowledge for addressing sustainable development, but there has been relatively limited consideration of their contributions to these social elements. Drawing on recent interest in social innovation as to conceptualise social change and community development, this paper aims to understand universities' involvement in the process of social innovation, for the particular case of a Brazilian higher education institution. By exploring how universities can contribute to the different stages of the social innovation process, it highlights the capacities that universities have to address the social sustainable development challenge. The paper identifies five characteristics of universities contributions to social innovation and sets out an agenda for future research necessary to understand universities' wider contributions to sustainable development.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Regional HELIX conference, 29th June – 1st July 2016, Castelo Branco, Portugal. We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. Any errors or omissions remain the authors’ responsibility.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio