E-social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation: The Case of On-Line Giving Markets

Entrepreneurship, business social orientation and web 2.0 are three areas of growing interest in last years, which converges in this work into a kind of entities that emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: peer to peer Charities and social e-banking. This paper aims at identifying common features and patterns across this social entrepreneurial organizations adopting enterprise 2.0 and technology scope (Markfleet, 2008). First of all, we would like to set this kind of entities at the intersection of two phenomena: social entrepreneurship and Web 2.0 development. Social enterprises were set up mainly in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Indeed, the demand of high levels of competitiveness in economic activities caused, in that period, a “natural selection” of sectors, territories and social groups that resulted in job losses in traditional sectors (agricultural and industrial) and consequently, in high rates of unemployment. This economic scenario made the defferent social agents adopt some strategies in order to include the excluded. Therefore, in most ABsTRAcT