Framework
Schools of social enterprise
The question it answers
A non-profit founder weighing up selling goods to fund the mission has to pick a model: is a social enterprise defined by earned income, by social innovation, or by the Grameen rule of no dividends?
- Origin
- Defourny and Nyssens, 2010; Yunus, Moingeon and Lehmann-Ortega, 2010
- Diagram type
- Comparison table
- Level of analysis
- Industry
Diagram
Schools of social enterprise
| Criterion | Earned-income school | Social innovation school | Grameen-style social business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | Commercial activity in support of a non-profit's mission | Social entrepreneurs as change makers: outcomes matter more than income | Social goal first; a non-loss, non-dividend company |
| Legal form | Non-profit; the broader strand includes for-profit companies | Often non-profit, but boundaries with the private and public sectors are blurred | Company |
| Place in the classification | First US school of thought | Second US school of thought | Tied to the mission-driven business strand of the first school, with stricter conditions |
Sources
References
Listed A–Z by author surname, Harvard style. A source with a DOI links to https://doi.org/…; one without links to its page or says plainly that it has no DOI.
- Defourny, J. and Nyssens, M. (2010) ‘Conceptions of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship in Europe and the United States: convergences and divergences’, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 1(1), pp. 32–53.doi:10.1080/19420670903442053Cited in 1 article
- Yunus, M., Moingeon, B. and Lehmann-Ortega, L. (2010) ‘Building social business models: lessons from the Grameen experience’, Long Range Planning, 43(2–3), pp. 308–325.doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2009.12.005Cited in 1 article