Entrepreneurial Leadership and Social Innovation Performance: A Comparison of Projects Under Malaysia Innovation Foundation’s Purview

Performance and sustainability of social innovation (SI) projects have always been a concern to funders. The huge profit gap between projects prompted Malaysia Innovation Foundation to seek for root causes and solutions to improve the performance of all social innovators/project managers who received the fund. This study examined the differences in entrepreneurial leadership characteristics of SI project managers between low and high-performing groups that affect their project performances. Both groups were assessed using the same entrepreneurial leadership attribute measures and a t-test analysis was performed. Being the eligible grant recipients, the respondents have some degree of entrepreneurial mindset. However, this study found other entrepreneurial leadership characteristics that potentially make a difference in driving a high-performance project. Evidently, SI project managers from high-performance group were more visionary, innovative, proactive, and better at interpretating opportunities compared to those from the low-performance group.