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1. Introduction
Social entrepreneurs (SEs) find creative solutions for the most pressing issues of modern society (Austin et al., 2006; Martin and Osberg, 2007), including poverty alleviation, climate change, refugee migration, hunger, access to clean water and sanitation, to mention only a few (Austin et al., 2006; Dees, 1998; Martin and Osberg, 2007). SEs are defined as individuals that create social value, combining entrepreneurial activities with attitudes from a wide range of entities such as public entities, NGOs, social enterprises, social businesses and similar initiatives seeking to improve the social welfare of others (Zahra et al., 2009). In this sense, SEs are contributing with solutions for the social and environmental challenges we face (van der Have and Rubalcaba, 2016) in a rather complementary way to comparable initiatives of SMEs, multinationals and governments (Roundy, 2014a, 2014b; Zahra et al., 2009). At the same time, however, SEs are known to face major challenges during their operations (Doherty et al., 2014; Saebi et al., 2019), the most pressing of which are the lack of funding (Bloom and Dees, 2008; Letaifa, 2016; Roundy, 2017), lack of human resources (Dees, 2012; Sharir and Lerner, 2006; Tötterman and Sten, 2005), lack of professional management (Certo and Miller, 2008; Volkmann et al., 2012; Webb et al., 2010; Wincent et al., 2014), underdeveloped networking skills (Shaw and Carter, 2007; Stam, 2015), mission drift (Austin et al., 2006; Mair, 2006) and the difficulty to scale the social enterprise (Freeman et al., 2006; Newbert and Tornikoski, 2013; Weber et al., 2012). The profound nature of these challenges throws a shadow on the potential social and environmental impact of SEs.
To overcome the above-mentioned operational challenges, SEs rely on their own efforts, but also on the backing of others (Hlady-Rispal and Servantie, 2018; Montgomery et al., 2012). However, our knowledge of how SEs can benefit most from the support of others remains fairly underdeveloped. Our field of research lacks a classification of the different types of support and the variety of motivations that may drive that support. Therefore, we concur with Roundy and Bonnal (2017, p. 21), who argue in favour of further research on “what type of institutions, formal rules and informal...