16 February 2011 at 15.30 at Euricse
With François BROUARD, Associate Professor and Director, Sprott Centre for Social Enterprises (Canada)
A review of the rapidly expanding literature on the topics of social entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurs and social enterprises suggests that definitions of each of these terms are still being developed and are by no means agreed upon. This presentation reports on empirical research designed to investigate social enterprises dimensions, namely financial self sufficiency, innovation and social transformation exhibited by social enterprises in Canada. From a researcher constructed dataset, the authors developed a set of profiles on sixty Canadian social enterprises utilizing publicly available information from each organization’s web site. Telephone interviews were conducted with an additional twenty social enterprises. The profiles showed that 31.7% of the sample enterprises were high in social transformation, 51.7% of the sample enterprises were high in financial self sufficiency, and 18.3% were highly innovative. Interviews revealed that the social enterprises were able to easily report degree of financial self sufficiency.
While interviewees expressed hope that they were achieving social transformation “we hope we are making an impact”, many did not measure the impacts of their enterprise and could not point to specific social transformation as a result of their work. Virtually all the interviewed social enterprises viewed themselves as highly innovative. A brief presentation of the Sprott Centre for Social Enterprises (SCSE) / Centre Sprott pour les entreprises sociales (CSES) will conclude the presentation.
