(Illustration by Anastasia Vasilakis)
In June 2025, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the academic home of SSIR, hosted its Junior Scholars Forum in partnership with the Doctoral Seminar in Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy (SEPHI) at ESSEC Business School in Paris. The articles in this issue’s Research section report on papers by scholars who participated in the forum.
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When young entrepreneurs in Iraq started a movement in 2013 to build a new startup ecosystem, they aimed to reinvent the troubled country’s economy. But as funding for their activities dried up and two of their startups were acquired, their original ideals softened and transformed.
A new research paper considers the question of how activists trying to solve big social problems “can accept to negotiate their vision for the field’s future and, therefore, how such ideologies can dissipate, turning into negotiable ideas.”
The author, Anne-Sophie Sabbatucci, is a PhD student at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where she is studying entrepreneurship. At the heart of her research is the idea of grand challenges, large social problems that evade simple solutions and require mass action to solve. Over the past decade, Iraqis have confronted the massive problem of how to reinvigorate their war-destroyed economy.
Sabbatucci’s work focused on the movement that a group of idealistic young businesspeople formed to seed and nurture Iraqi startups. These founders had high standards: They wanted to build a private sector free from corruption, greedy corporations, and an oppressive and unhelpful government.
The group received funding from development agencies to support their activities and created a community of entrepreneurs who formed new companies and hired employees. But over time the members’ shared ideology came under pressure, as funds dried up. When large corporations acquired two of the first startups, would members change their mindset and no longer rail against corporate influence?
In response, the group adopted a more pragmatic outlook and softened their stance. The movement’s evolution sheds light on how ideologies can change over time as the real world intrudes on firmly held beliefs: “Initial ambitious objectives and visions for the field are often modified,” she writes.
Sabbatucci employs theories from micro-sociology to study the Iraqi entrepreneurship movement’s development between 2013 and 2024, making three trips to Iraq since 2022. She conducted 90 interviews before January 2023 and another 75 after, sometimes with the same interview subject. She also listened to 64 interviews from a local podcast on entrepreneurship; read through 5,000 pages of reports, blogs, and social media posts; and assembled a trove of documentaries, webinars, and audio recordings.
During her field visits, she observed the workspaces and homes of interviewees, as well as attending the entrepreneurship group’s events, for an additional 100 hours of conversations. She also studied the country’s history, as a way of placing the movement for entrepreneurship in context.
She observed that, after the startup acquisitions, the greater influence of corporations and donors on the movement’s nonprofits led to mollification of their views and activities. Although the group continued to host and promote events like skill-building workshops, it sponsored fewer programs related directly to entrepreneurship, such as incubators.
“As a result of the dissipation of the entrepreneurship ideology, part of its ideas, together with the primary group, survived to influence the private sector change in Iraq,” Sabbatucci writes. Her exhaustive research allowed her to see the broader arc of change as the group let go of its insistence that all its activities should be separate from the corporate sphere.
“This paper explores a puzzling paradox between the ambitious ideas that many grassroots collectives hold for their field and the difficulty to change and mold such ideas,” says Sophie Bacq, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development.
Sabbatucci’s research also points toward an explanation of how and why entrepreneurship can spark changes within an economy and the larger society, says Todd Schifeling, an associate professor of management at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and Management: “We learn how entrepreneurship advocates in Iraq seek to build a coherent movement and ideology, encounter resistance and setbacks from the government and incumbent corporations, and then reorganize and reformulate their movement to better weave their vision into the existing system.”
Research paper: “Echoes of a Field Ideology: The Journey of a
Collective’s Ideas to Develop Iraq’s Private Secto,” by Anne-Sophie Sabbatucci.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.