Abstract
To survive and succeed, companies must innovate. As employee creativity is an important source of organizational innovation and competitive advantage. nowadays, organizations are increasingly seeking to foster individual creativity. In the existing literature, employee creativity is beneficial for organizations to achieve organizational innovation. However, in previous studies focused on exploring the key factors of employee creativity, and provided the managing strategy for encouraging employee creativity only for commercial companies. The practice of facilitate employee creativity in different industries, or different organizational contexts remains unexplored. Social enterprises by innovative business means, practice the mission of solves social problems and dedicates to environmental sustainability, employee creativity may be an important source of organizational innovation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how to facilitate employee creativity in social enterprises. This research adopted qualitative research method (grounded theory), depth interviews with four social enterprises in Taiwan, to create the process model of facilitating employee creativity for social enterprise. The results of the study indicate that most of the employees who join social enterprises were hoping to be able to create more social values. Therefore, in order to promote employee creativity, social enterprises should reinforce the connection between employees and social mission. Additionally, allowing employees to participate in determining operating strategy and mandating employees to have adequate flexibility.