Abstract

Abstract Research on the formation of prosocial ventures has attracted substantial interest in the field of social entrepreneurship for more than a decade. Yet, the understanding of how prosocial founders use judgments for the assessment of opportunity-related information to create prosocial ventures remains relatively unexamined. We conducted an abductive, qualitative study with 34 first-time founders using verbal protocols and content analysis techniques to explore how founders with ‘other-oriented’ social identities judge venture ideas in contrast to founders with ‘me-oriented’ social identities. As a result, we theorise a model which reveals how the motivation and subjective goals of prosocial founders influence their venture idea judgments and meaning-making processes. We contribute to the social entrepreneurship literature by displaying how founders with social goal-motivations gain opportunity confidence through their choice of judgement criteria during opportunity evaluation.