What Do We Know About Nonprofit Entrepreneurs? : Results from a Large-Scale Survey

While the academic fields of entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship have grown rapidly, nonprofit entrepreneurship has remained a minor field of inquiry, even though 50,000 nonprofits are started each year. Using a survey of 7,000 nonprofit founders, we provide baseline data on key dimensions of nonprofit entrepreneurship. We find that typical nonprofit entrepreneurs are distinct from for-profit entrepreneurs in several ways; they have bigger founding teams, are wealthier, older, more educated, and are less driven by self-employment. These differences inform a research agenda for the field. This study represents the first large-scale empirical analysis of entrepreneurship in the nonprofit sector