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This book argues that embeddedness and community participation bring unique propositions for social entrepreneurship to foster social inclusion. It uncovers the role of local knowledge and grassroots level innovations to create necessary environment for the positive social change to roll. Social enterprises have proven to reduce drudgery of poor and excluded by offering creative and innovative solutions for long standing social problems. The grassroots level creative problem solving mechanisms they initiate travel through a variety of local dynamics and cultural contexts. However, social innovations quite often do not achieve their intended results, especially when they fail to understand the local contexts and embed themselves in such dynamism. In this background, the book attempts to understand and analyse the ´connect´ between the social innovations and local dynamism. It argues that the community-driven innovation management which is based on local knowledge inspires the social entrepreneurial process and builds capacities and infrastructure to foster social inclusion. Each chapter in this book offers development scholars rich narration about how social problems have been approached, addressed, and altered through rich insights from communities and the social entrepreneurial teams.

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1. Introduction

2. Social Entrepreneurship, Community Participation and Embeddedness

3. Barefoot College - Philosophy and Governance

4. Barefoot approach and its practice

5. Implications of the barefoot approach on the rural poor

6. Barefoot as a social enterprise

7. Conclusion

References

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Rama Krishna Reddy Kummitha is currently associated with the School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He was earlier associated with the Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, United Nations University, Japan as a JSPS researcher, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo as a Visiting Researcher and University of Liege, Belgium as a postdoctoral researcher. Further, he was also an Assistant Professor at the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. He is the author of Social Entrepreneurship: Working towards Greater Inclusiveness, having published extensively on social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

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