The drivers of social enterprise performance in Malaysia: Social innovation as a mediator.

Social enterprise is considered as one of the initiatives to eliminate and minimize social issues. While studies on social entrepreneurship have grown in popularity over the years, the factors contributing towards the performance of social enterprise have yet to be fully discovered. The objective of this study is to explore the relationships between government support, stakeholder engagement, and earned-income generation with social enterprise performance. This study also seeks to bridge a gap in the literature by responding to calls for greater attention on social innovation in the context of social entrepreneurship, and therefore the mediation role of social innovation was investigated. Using a quantitative method, data were collected from social enterprises in Malaysia by using the purposive sampling technique. The results indicate that stakeholder engagement and earned-income generation have a significant relationship with social enterprise performance. While government support showed an insignificant relationship with social enterprise performance. The study also confirmed the mediating role of social innovation between stakeholder engagement and earned-income generation towards social enterprise performance. The analyses presented in this research would add to the body of knowledge related to social entrepreneurship and can be used by policymakers in planning long-term strategies in terms of evaluating policy schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]