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The intention to set up social ventures remains an unpopular choice for intending entrepreneurs due to its obvious limitations of resource constraints. Yet it remains a vital means of making social goods available to disadvantaged people, especially in developing countries. Our study aims to investigate how prior experience and networking ability interacts with empathy, moral obligation, self-efficacy, and social support to induce social entrepreneurial intentions in budding entrepreneurs in Nigeria. Using simultaneous linear regression, we analyzed data from a collection of 315 respondents enrolled in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC)—a one-year mandatory national service scheme for graduates of higher institutions who are on the verge of making critical career choices. Our findings show that the main effects were statistically significant, while networking ability, more than prior experience, moderated the main effects. Conclusively, budding entrepreneurs need to hone their networking skills in order to exploit their social networks and complement the benefits of prior experiences as they contemplate social entrepreneurship. Future investigations can focus on determining how other environmental factors such as government/institutional support, technological adoption, and infrastructure would affect social entrepreneurial intentions.

The relationship between diversification and firm performance varies among institutions and over time. Less is known about the advantageousness of diversification in economy-wide crises, which have occurred frequently in recent years Using data from a recent survey, we studied nearly 400 Nigeria private firms using two different approaches panel and cross-period comparisons. The findings of both approaches show that diversified firms performed better than focused firms. This was also true during the 2008 global financial crisis. The higher the diversification level, the more positive the firm performance was. We also investigated the influence of ownership structure. Firms that are totally owned by the founding owner and his/her family tend to have unsatisfactory performance under crisis. This finding provides evidence of the increasing attention on management and governance to explain firm. Linear regression models were evaluated to test the effect of diversification on firm performance. Panel A uses profit as the dependent variable, and Panel B uses sales. For each year (2007, 2008, and 2009), two regression models were evaluated: one testing the impact of diversification and the other testing the impact of the diversification level. We found that diversified firms performed better than focused firms during the recent global financial crisis. The diversification level was positively and linearly related to performance, that is, more diversified firms performed better. Moreover, we found that private firms that are totally owned by the founding owner and his/her family performed worse under crisis.