소셜벤처의 의사결정 프로세스에 관한 연구: 고요한택시 사례

Traditionally social problems had been largely left to be handled by non-profit organizations, not because of lack of interests in social causes but mostly because of lack of innovative ideas to solve them in commercially viable ways. This market failure has recently been fixed by social enterprises, which manage to provide both solutions for social issues and commercially viable business models. As a result, we have been witnessing a sudden spike of public interests in these social enterprises as well as a call for empirical investigation on social enterprises by prior studies. However, empirically investigating a social enterprise has been a challenging endeavor mostly due to the insufficient number of successful social enterprises. Answering to the call in this study, we empirically investigate Goyohan Taxi, a successful social enterprise that partners with visually impaired cabdrivers and offers a taxi service, by both longitudinally interviewing the founder and adopting in vivo observation throughout the entrepreneurial journey of Goyohan Taxi. Based on the single case study method, we find that Goyohan Taxi adopts two distinctive decision-making mechanisms, the de-escalation of commitment and the orthogonality of commercial and social goals. Although generalizability of the our finding is minimal due to the limitation of single case study method, our finding contributes to the research of social entrepreneurship by offering new avenue of research in decision-making process of social entrepreneurs.