Spark Social Enterprise partners over de vloer: George Tsekouras

Regelmatig komen de internationale partners uit het SPARK Social Enterprise programma samen voor de zogeheten stuurgroep meetings. Afgelopen meeting vond plaats in het Seinwezen, een mooie kans om onze partners een aantal vragen te stellen. 

In dit artikel: George Tsekouras van de University of Brighton.

George Tsekouras - University of Brighton (UK)

What are the most valuable research insights from the Accelerator?
Through the research we found out that a lot of social enterprises are driven by the desire to make social environmental impact, but they are not necessarily familiar with the way of structuring and organizing activities in order to a) make the significant impact they want to achieve and b) to be sustainable in the long run, because making impact goes together with raising income. So you if you have great social impact without raising income, you don't come anywhere. This is the thing for social enterprises they are struggling with. They are fantastic in generating new ideas, new ways of improving social and environmental conditions, but how to do that properly in order to deliver significant impact, also through raising income is difficult so they will need significant support.

The good news is that through our accelerator program, from which we've shown the results this morning, we can see that we have a structured support program for the social enterprises including one-to-one coaching, peer-to-peer learning, and all the things that we are doing. The social enterprises responded very positively about these things. Example of a result is that 82 percent of the social enterprises that went through the program said that they have increased their business skills, in terms of business targeting and long-term planning. 70 percent said they have launched a new product, 75 percent increased their skills in how to launch their product into the market. We are seeing a lot of positive developments in that area.

In terms of measuring, are there any valuable lessons?
I think it is a similar story, some social enterprises are measuring the social impact, few social enterprises measure the financial stability and much fewer have indicators in place to measure the innovation activities. This is where improvement needs to take place within the program.