University of Twente Student Theses
Barriers to Social Ventures’ attraction of funding: A legitimation perspective on business plan competitions
Mols, N. (2015) Barriers to Social Ventures’ attraction of funding: A legitimation perspective on business plan competitions.
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| Abstract: | The attraction of funding is one of the prevailing challenges in the field of social entrepreneurship. The emphasis on social return over financial return and lacking collateral aggravate the persuasion of investors. Business plan competitions form one alternative approach to funding. But which criteria contribute to a successful application is undetermined yet. This thesis analyzes the information content of 126 business plan applications. Content analysis is applied in order to evaluate how the criteria solution, partnership, growth and social impact affect the cognitive legitimacy of the judges and the final decision-making. Exercising ordinal logistic regression further processes the collected data. The results clearly indicate that information content related to the solution offered by the social venture has most significant influence on the cognitive legitimacy perception of the judges and therewith the funding outcome. But also content on growth and partnership is essential to complement the information. The three components should be balanced well in any application that aims to win the funding. The criterion social impact is found to be a keynote that is a requirement for every application, but that statistically does not differentiate a participant from a finalist or a winner. The tested multi-criterion model can explain up to 32.7% of the variance in the funding outcome and can therefore help social entrepreneurs to focus their funding application writing and sensitize them to how funding judgments are finally made. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Business Administration MSc (60644) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/68924 |
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