BRIDGING THE INTENTION–IMPACT DIVIDE IN SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW OF VENTURE CREATION PATHWAYS, ENABLING CONDITIONS AND SUSTAINABLE SOCIAL IMPACT

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is being increasingly advocated as a business pathway towards sustainable social impact and higher-education institutions have started to heavily invest in cultivating their students' social entrepreneurial intention. However, the body of literature that helps to understand how intention becomes an operating enterprise and then tangible and sustainable social change is not well integrated into management and entrepreneurship and nonprofit journals. This review compiles that literature and aims to identify pathways, enabling conditions and outcome measures linking social entrepreneurial intention to sustainable social impact. A systematic literature review was performed using the PRISMA protocol. A search of Scopus and Web of Science was conducted for peer-reviewed articles between January 2015 and June 2025, resulting in 2,028 records after de-duplication, screening and full-text appraisal, 67 studies were chosen for analysis using descriptive and thematic synthesis. The findings reveal five themes in the literature: intention-to-action conversion, resource mobilisation and business venture formation, hybrid business-model design, impact measurement and scaling, and ecosystem-level enabling conditions. The point of the evidence is that intention alone is a weak predictor of venture creation unless it is accompanied by self-efficacy, opportunity recognition and institutional support, and that sustained impact requires business-model coherence and that measurement systems are used to learn about, and not merely for reporting. The review provides an integrated intention to impact framework, and a structured future research agenda for longitudinal designs, standardised measures of impact and evidence from the emerging economies. The framework provides a foundation for educators, incubators and policy makers to develop an intervention that goes beyond intention formation to impact realization.