Design thinking for social innovation: Secrets to success for tourism social entrepreneurs

Tourism Social Entrepreneurship is a market-based strategy for sustainable tourism development. It solves complex social issues to benefit disadvantaged stakeholders, while seeking to achieve financial sustainability and boost the benefits of tourism. Currently, there is little insight into how social entrepreneurs create these innovative social solutions. This black box hinders the understanding and replication of tourism social entrepreneurial success in different contexts, thus preventing the social benefits of tourism from increasing. We suggest that the literature on TSE can be informed by design thinking - a human centered framework for social innovation. Taking a social enterprise in Vietnam as a case study of Community-Based Tourism Travel, this paper reveals that tourism social entrepreneurs have developed an intuitive ability to apply design thinking to social innovation, despite lacking training. The paper thus sheds light on the social entrepreneur's innovative abilities, and contributes to fostering successful social entrepreneurship in a tourism context.