Allan Villegas-Mateos, Mario Vázquez-Maguirre
The objective of this work is to analyze how Social Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (SEE) in low-vulnerability and high-vulnerability regions of a country may influence the creation and operation of social ventures. To do so the study follows one of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s (GEM) surveys, the National Experts Survey (NES). Particularly, the instrument from 2015 when the GEM teams around the globe made a unique effort to collect data for a special topic report on social entrepreneurship including eight questions to measure social entrepreneurship as an additional section of the survey. The authors used the case of Mexico because the GEM national team collected NES responses in 5 of the 32 entities within the country (Guanajuato, Jalisco, Puebla, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosí) that year. Therefore, considering demographic and economic indicators the entities were grouped into two regions according to their levels of vulnerability. The resulting pool of data of regional NES responses in Mexico during 2015 was a total of N=188 experts, 74 located in High Vulnerability (HV) regions, and 114 in Low Vulnerability (LV) regions. The authors used non-parametric statistics to compare the differences between both regions. The results suggest that experts in low vulnerability regions perceived more favorable conditions for social entrepreneurs than in high vulnerability regions. The SEE in Mexico seems to be more consolidated in central regions where the main actors carry out most of their activities. Therefore, social entrepreneurs may face higher challenges to create and operate social ventures in peripheral regions. This study contributes to the empirical literature in regional Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EE) by analyzing local ecosystems grouped by regions that share similar levels of vulnerability. This research also sheds light on how the EE may have conditions that can also promote the creation and development of social ventures even though the objective of these ecosystems are not primarily social but economic. In this sense, promoting an EE may favor the creation of SEE, although the latter is most needed in peripheral regions which traditionally experience higher levels of vulnerability.