Timmons' Framework

Defined as a process in which resources are creatively combined to explore and exploit opportunities, to meet social needs or stimulate social change, social entrepreneurship (SE) is seen as a key factor to reduce poverty, improve the environment and increase employment. In the past decade or so, social entrepreneurship has achieved remarkable progress in solving social problems in developing countries. Meanwhile, it has also attracted extensive attention from academia being its central concerns different from the traditional commercial entrepreneurship. Leading management and entrepreneurship journals continue to publish papers related to social entrepreneurship, unravelling its innovative role in solving social problems and promoting economic development. As a new research field with theoretical and practical value, social entrepreneurship has become an important social transformation under the complex market environment and institutional background. However, the fact is that related research is still in the stage of exploration and development and the relevant theoretical framework incomplete. It leads to the scattered theoretical results failing to fully understand the research topic. So, the key to solve research deficiencies is to analyze the internal logic of social entrepreneurship by tracking the whole process of entrepreneurial behavior.

Similar to entrepreneurial research, early social entrepreneurship research inherits the traditional entrepreneurial traits theory, focusing on the personal factors of entrepreneurs (such as personal traits, entrepreneurial motivation) and analyzing the influence of entrepreneurs from a cognitive perspective. Later research gradually introduces the entrepreneurship process theory, including a series of activities such as social entrepreneurship opportunity cognition, resource acquisition and legitimacy establishment. They analyze the action law of social entrepreneurship from the perspective of process and explain the entrepreneurship results with entrepreneurial behavior. It realizes the change of research content from "who is the social entrepreneur or social enterprise" to "what is the main body of social entrepreneurship doing" and "what is the result of social entrepreneurship". However, the research on different topics ignores the connection and divides the interaction among social entrepreneurial subjects, entrepreneurial behaviors, and entrepreneurial environments. While the fact is that the particularity of social entrepreneurship is not only the specific behavior of a very small number of members of society, but also the survival and development process of the organization based on the identification, utilization and development of entrepreneurial opportunities. In other words, social entrepreneurship is an organizational practice initiated by entrepreneurs, implemented through entrepreneurial activities, and incorporated into an entrepreneurial environment. The different elements jointly determine the success or failure of social entrepreneurship. However, the existing research obviously ignores this internal logic, which hinders the development of social entrepreneurship research. Therefore, when breaking through this limitation, it is very important to deeply explain the process form an analysis framework of "factors-behaviors-effects". Although there are already some excellent reviews, they tend to focus on the analysis of specific problems within social entrepreneurship. For example, they either explain the connotation of the relevant concepts of social entrepreneurship, its causes, influencing factors and the mixed characteristics of social enterprises, or analyze the relationship between social entrepreneurship and social innovation, explore the measurement of social impact. It dispersedly summarizes the existing research results neglecting the systematic grasp of the entrepreneurial process. Especially, there is a lack of a complete analysis of the core element-opportunity. This research wants to integrate the existing social entrepreneurship research from the perspective of opportunity, that is, taking the social entrepreneurship opportunity as the core, combining the social entrepreneurship subject and resources, to explore the whole process of social entrepreneurship. Timmons's entrepreneurial process model perfectly integrates the key elements of entrepreneurship. And it is currently the most suitable model for the entrepreneurial process, taking into account the dynamics and complexity of entrepreneurship. It can achieve the proper connection between different research themes and help to outline the behavioral contour of social entrepreneurship. It could provide a suitable theoretical perspective for explaining how various factors are continuously and dynamically adjusted with the growth of entrepreneurship. Focusing on this goal, this study connects subjects, opportunities and resources to deeply explore the interaction and dynamic balance between various elements from the perspective of social entrepreneurship process. Then we conclusively construct a social entrepreneurship process model (as shown in Figure 1).

The contribution of this study is mainly reflected in the following aspects. First, it deepens the academic community's understanding of social entrepreneurship. At present, the results of limited social entrepreneurship research are scattered. Through a systematic review and sorting of the existing social entrepreneurship literature, this study constructs a research framework from three aspects: social entrepreneurship subjects (social entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurship organizations), entrepreneurship opportunities (sources, identification, development) and entrepreneurship resources (resource acquisition, legitimacy construction). We aim at revealing the behavioral essence and internal laws of social entrepreneurship, thus contributing to the rationality and prospect of social entrepreneurship. Second, this study enriches the research perspective of social entrepreneurship. As an important driving force for creating social value,

social entrepreneurship needs a theoretical system that integrates all key entrepreneurial elements and analyzes its internal interaction mechanism. The combination of Timmons's process model and the idea of entrepreneurial opportunity process ingeniously links the key elements and main entrepreneurial behaviors in the process of social entrepreneurship, deeply exploring the mechanism of achieving social entrepreneurship goals. It helps to understand how each component of social entrepreneurship adapts to each other, which research gaps would continue to exist, and through which ways the corresponding most urgent gaps can be solved, thus provide a suitable perspective for studying and discussing how social entrepreneurship can survive and develop better.