Tina Saebi received the prestigious Impact Award

Tina Saebi
Associate Professor Tina Saebi from the Department of Strategy and Management at NHH, along with Nicolai J. Foss from CBS and Stefan Linder from Essec, were recently awarded the prestigious Scholarly Impact Award from the Journal of Management. Photo: Helge Skodvin
By Sigrid Folkestad

5 September 2024 13:34

Tina Saebi received the prestigious Impact Award

NHH researcher Tina Saebi has been awarded the 2024 Scholarly Impact Award from the Journal of Management, recognizing papers that have made the most significant impact in the field.

The Paper

Social Entrepreneurship Research: Past Achievements and Future Promises is by Associate Professor at NHH Tina Saebi, Professor Nicolai J. Foss at Copenhagen Business School and Adjunct Professor at NHH, and Professor Stefan Linder at ESSEC Business School.

Associate Professor Tina Saebi from the Department of Strategy and Management at NHH, along with Nicolai J. Foss from CBS and Stefan Linder from Essec, were recently awarded the prestigious Scholarly Impact Award from the Journal of Management.

Social Entrepreneurship

Saebi and her coauthors receive the award for their paper Social Entrepreneurship Research: Past Achievements and Future Promises (2019).

Associate Professor Tina Saebi, Department of Strategy and Management at NHH.
Associate Professor Tina Saebi, Department of Strategy and Management at NHH.

`This recognition might bring more attention to the importance of social entrepreneurship and using systematic literature reviews´, Tina Saebi says.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is a rapidly growing field. It refers to individuals and organizations that apply business principles to address social issues, such as poverty, inequality, and education.

`While the concept of social entrepreneurship has been around for decades, there’s been a notable increase in research in the past ten years. We were particularly inspired by the need to combine existing knowledge and address the fragmentation in literature, ´she says.

Social entrepreneurship draws from many disciplines, and partly because of that, it lacks a dominant framework, which is what the researchers sought to address, according to the researchers.

Gaps in our understanding

They reviewed over 395 peer-reviewed articles on social entrepreneurship and found notable gaps in our understanding of how SE operates across multiple dimensions. For example, SE activities might be examined at the individual level—such as the traits and motivations of social entrepreneurs—or at the organizational level—looking at how social ventures are structured – or how they affect the wellbeing of communities at the macro level.

The Scholarly Impact Award

The Scholarly Impact Award includes articles published five years ago that have had the greatest impact on the field. Journal of Management evaluates a variety of criteria when determining the winners. These include the extent to which the article changed our way of thinking, how the article added to what we know, and the reach the article has had in terms of affecting ongoing work in the field. Each one has a far-reaching impact on scholarly work.

They propose an integrative, multistage, multilevel framework to connect these different levels and provide a more holistic understanding of SE.

`What are some of the future directions you hope this field will take following your findings? ´

`One of the biggest gaps we identified is the lack of longitudinal, large-scale empirical data on SE's societal impact. Future research would benefit from measuring the long-term impact of SE ventures, particularly in terms of poverty alleviation, institutional change, and inclusive growth´, Saebi says.