Guillermo Sosa-Gómez: “Social Entrepreneurship Helps Universities Remain Relevant to Society”
In this interview, Guillermo Sosa-Gómez, Associate Researcher at Laboratory for Reputation Management in Education (RepLab) and a member of the Academic Council of the Master's programme "Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation", reflects on the social mission of universities, the role of social entrepreneurship in contemporary higher education, and the importance of international academic cooperation. The conversation also explores the challenges of measuring social impact and the development of joint research initiatives between Russia and Mexico.
Professor Sosa-Gómez, could you briefly tell us about your academic background and what led you to study social entrepreneurship?
My training is in mathematics — algebraic cryptography, specifically. For years I worked on abstract problems: Boolean functions, elliptic curves, coding theory. The shift toward social entrepreneurship was gradual, and it came through teaching. When I started watching students at Universidad Panamericana's School of Economics and Business actually solve real community problems — with almost no resources but with a lot of ingenuity and commitment — I found myself asking what theoretical and methodological tools we could actually give them. That question pulled me into social entrepreneurship as a research field. And I discovered it has the same structure as any well-posed mathematical problem: real constraints, clear objectives, and solutions that have to be verified in practice.
What does it mean to study social entrepreneurship from the perspective of Universidad Panamericana?
The university has a concrete identity: its mission is anchored in Christian humanism and in forming people who serve society. That isn't rhetoric — it has methodological consequences. We study social entrepreneurship not as an efficiency instrument but as an expression of personal and community responsibility. The Panamerican Entrepreneurship Hub I lead operates under that logic. We connect academic research with real projects, and the question always on the table is whether what we do has measurable impact on actual people — not just on abstract indicators.
What are the main research questions guiding your current academic work?
Three lines occupy me right now. First: how do we measure the real impact of university social entrepreneurship ecosystems, beyond conventional bibliometric or ranking indicators? Second: what institutional conditions allow students to develop sustainable initiatives — not just weekend projects that die after a semester? Third, and more broadly: how do universities' stated social missions relate to their actual practices? I work on that last one with quantitative models, including Bayesian approaches, because I want to go beyond surface-level correlations.
Why is social entrepreneurship especially relevant for universities today?
Because universities face a legitimacy crisis they won't solve by publishing more papers in indexed journals. Society is asking what they're for, and the answer can't just be "we train professionals" or "we generate knowledge." Social entrepreneurship offers a bridge: it connects research to real problems, involves students in change processes, and forces institutions to account for themselves to their surroundings. It's also a space where interdisciplinarity isn't a curricular ornament — it's an operational necessity.
You have collaborated with HSE University - Saint Petersburg and RepLab. How would you describe this academic cooperation?
It works because the objectives are symmetric. Both institutions want to understand how universities build and manage their reputation in the field of social responsibility, and what role entrepreneurship plays in that. With the Laboratory for Reputation Management in Education we've developed comparative frameworks that wouldn't have been possible working only from Mexico or only from Russia. The difference in contexts — institutional, cultural, historical — is precisely what gives the joint work its analytical value.
What is the value of studying social entrepreneurship from an international and comparative perspective?
The value is in avoiding the single-case trap. When you study social entrepreneurship in only one country or one university tradition, you tend to naturalize what is actually contingent — you take certain conditions as universal when they're local. The comparative perspective forces you to separate general principles from context-specific factors. And that has practical implications: a model that works in Saint Petersburg can't be mechanically transferred to Guadalajara, but you can identify which elements are transferable and under what conditions.
What can Mexico and Russia learn from each other in the fields of social entrepreneurship, sustainability, and the social mission of universities?
Mexico has deep-rooted community-based social economy experience — cooperatives, ejidos, micro-entrepreneurship networks with territorial anchoring — that isn't always studied as social entrepreneurship but functions exactly that way. Russia has a tradition of university-industry linkage that, even though it emerged in a very different context, generated knowledge-transfer mechanisms that are relevant for any university system that wants to be functional rather than declarative. The exchange isn't easy because the institutional frameworks are very different, but that difficulty is itself an interesting data point for research.
How do you understand the social mission of the university in the twenty-first century?
As an obligation of relevance. The university makes no sense if it doesn't contribute to solving the problems of its time, but that contribution can't be done well without rigor. The tension between relevance and rigor is real, and it doesn't resolve itself by picking one side — it has to be managed. In concrete terms, I think the twenty-first century university must form people who think independently, researchers who work with methodological honesty, and institutions that account for themselves — not just to their academic peers, but to the society that funds them and needs them.
What role can students play in social entrepreneurship and sustainability projects?
A central one, not a peripheral one. The most common mistake is treating students as beneficiaries of training or as labor for projects designed by academics. What we've learned at the Hub is that students have diagnostic and action capacity that professors don't, precisely because they're closer to certain problems. Their role shouldn't be to execute plans but to co-design them. That requires institutions to be willing to give up some control — which doesn't always happen.
You are involved in projects connected to the International SatLab Consortium on Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability. What does this type of academic network contribute?
What it contributes, above all, is critical mass. Many of the problems we study require comparative data that no single institution can generate on its own. The consortium allows us to share measurement instruments, validate methodologies in different contexts, and build an evidence base that's stronger than what any national team working in isolation could produce. It also serves a function that tends to get underestimated: creating conditions of trust among researchers from different countries, which is a prerequisite for any serious collaboration.
What are the main challenges in researching and teaching social entrepreneurship today?
In research, the central problem is measurement. Social impact is diffuse, it unfolds over time, and it resists easy quantification. That makes it vulnerable to two opposite pathologies: narrative without data, and indicators that measure what's easy to measure but not what matters. In teaching, the challenge is different: how do you form students who can tolerate ambiguity, work with scarce resources, and sustain projects beyond the initial enthusiasm? That doesn't happen in a traditional classroom — it requires real experience and close mentorship.
What projects or research lines would you like to develop in the coming years with HSE RepLab and its international partners?
Two lines seem urgent to me. One is building a methodologically sound comparative index of university social impact — one that doesn't depend on institutional self-reporting, something that combines observational data with Bayesian hierarchical models. The other is developing a systematic alumni tracking program for graduates who participated in social entrepreneurship initiatives, to understand which training conditions predict real medium-term impact. Both lines need international partners not as decoration but because the validity of the results depends on them working in more than one context.
