Cognitive characteristics of the social entrepreneur in Spain

Social entrepreneurs are people who know that there are several social problems forgotten by governments and public institutions and decide to solve these situations creating new business. Few empirical studies deepen the knowledge of this group of entrepreneurs, and particulary the literature focusing on the variables that affect the decision to create a social enterprise is scarce. This research, using Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data, analyzes the influence on the decision of becoming a social entrepreneur of three cognitive variables, fear of failure, perception of opportunities and self-efficacy. Moreover, we compare the results obtained for social entrepreneurs with a sample of commercial entrepreneurs. The main conclusions of this paper is that the influence of cognitive variables on entrepreneurs profile is different.