PERCEIVING SUCCESS AMONG SHARIAH COMPLIANT CROWDFUNDING SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

Abstract

In this paper we have decided to study the social enterprise as a particular form of entrepreneurial venture. Looking to the huge challenges of our time, such poverty, scarcity of natural resources and effects of climate change, we do believe that humanity is in a real need of triple bottom line entrepreneurs. Tackling social issues and alleviating poverty through social entrepreneurship becomes a focal strategy followed by governments(Rametse & Shah, 2013).The wellbeing of societies is ensured through an innovative manner of identifying opportunities and mobilizing resources (Najafizada & Cohen, 2017).Therefore, the funding phase remains a key element for any kind of enterprise. Thus, the real challenge in front of social entrepreneurs is the limited access to the sources of finance (Emerson et al., 2008). Taking into consideration the innovative character of social entrepreneurship (Alvord et al., 2004) , the traditional tools of funding are not suitable to the main objectives of social enterprises (Ridley.-Duff, 2008;Fedele and Miniaci, 2010).Investors in case of social entrepreneurship are different from their counterparts at several levels . The cultural and the cognitive dimension in social entrepreneurship differs (Lehner, 2013; Brest and Born,2013), also the monetary incentive plays an important role in determining the nature of stakeholders (Van Slyke, 2006). We selected creative sources of funding that could fit the core of such form of entrepreneurship, especially in the Pre-seed/ seed stage and the start up phase. With the excessive use of web technology, business is also influenced by this digital advance. Crowdfunding is considered as a new mean of funding that breaks all kinds of intermediation between the entrepreneur and the source of finance. Henceforth, Crowdfunding seems to be adequate to these phases of the launch of new social ventures (Lasrado, 2013). In light of these realities, an original tool of funding appears which is matching the principles of Islamic finance and the technique of crowdfunding. The literature review analysis allowed us to call this new source of finance as “Shariah compliant Crowdfunding”. Consequently, we will attempt to provide some answers to the research problem formulated as follow: What is the perception of social entrepreneurs concerning success on Shariah compliant crowdfunding platforms? To respond to this question a qualitative approach was considered through semi-structured interviews.