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Mini Track Chair:
The recent innovations in products, processes and business models are reshaping the world approach to entrepreneurship, giving a higher relevance to the social and local dimensions of business. The social enterprise model of business is gaining in popularity as it gives the opportunity to combine societal goals with commercial objectives for the benefit of community and environment. Social economy enterprises must compete in the marketplace like any other business to achieve an impact, proving to be a dynamic and progressive business that all the other enterprises can learn from. In the last decade, innovation and entrepreneurship were boosted by digital technologies like social media, connecting people to the Internet of Things, big and open data and crowd sourcing platforms.
Digital innovations are expected to create new online instruments (new ICT services) that enable entrepreneurship and social innovation to take advantage of the network effect typical of the Internet. Thanks to new ICT instruments or to a better and more efficient, effective, sustainable and fair use of existing ICT tools, innovation and entrepreneurship are then stimulated by new ways of collaborating, creating and sharing knowledge and resources online. Therefore, social entrepreneurs are becoming essential for addressing Europe’s main economic, social, and environmental challenges.
The aim of this mini track is to explore how social entrepreneurship and impact innovations can be furthered nurtured, developed and scaled across the global communities. Also, it aims to discover how innovation is shaping the way services and goods are produced and distributed in a cyber-physical environment and how these emerging models influence the development of local communities integrating them in a global interconnected world.
The main topics covered by the hereby call for papers are related to:
Carmen Păunescu
is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the UNESCO Department for Business Administration at Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE), Romania. Her research interests lie in the areas of social entrepreneurship, impact innovations, business continuity, sustainable entrepreneurship and higher education. Presently, she is involved in supervising PhD students in various areas covering topics that concern development of social entrepreneurship and impact innovations across different sectors of activity. Carmen acted as an expert and local coordinator of the Erasmus+ projects “CLLC—Community Learning for Local Change”, “VISEnet—Village social enterprise: learning material, guidance and networking” and „RuralCOM – Joint curriculum for rural community development”. Currently, she leads the WG2 Higher Education Institutions (HEI), social change and transformation as part of the COST Action CA 18236 Multidisciplinary innovation for social change. Carmen published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters. She is an Associate Editor of the journal of Management and Marketing.
Mary McDonnell Naughton
is a Registered Nurse, Midwife, and Registered Nurse Tutor. She is currently a lecturer at the Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland and Chairperson of College’s Research Ethics Committee. She holds a PhD from the College of Medicine, University College Dublin, Ireland and has extensive research experience with members of the interdisciplinary team, beeing involved in collaborating international research across disciplines. Mary has supervised students and engaged in various areas of research from Child Health, Smoking, Alcohol and Learning Disability to aspects associated with the Older Person, especially the centenarian. She has also been a member of various European COST actions in Old-Age Social Exclusion and Ageism. Along with an interest in Ethics, Mary also has an interest in innovation, social and community engagement work and has engaged in various community research projects. Presently, she is involved in supervising PhD students in various areas from Centenarians and Factors Contributing to Successful Ageing, through to novel ICT enabling technologies that enhances quality of life to cross generational changes in relation to food preferences.
