Outreach for social enterprise development

AN enterprise, committed to sustain its governance and transformation initiative, with a partner college or university also enrolled in a good governance program, can more easily deepen and spread its socio-economic impact on an area or region, mainly through the alliance of civil society organizations and civic groups formed under the aegis of a “partner-college or university.” This sounds complicated enough: it demands several wheels turning in close collaboration with one another. Can it be made to work? Yes, it can be made to work through a pro-active alliance, with its “partnercollege or university,” and also involving at leasta few local civil society groups and civic organizations. Through such a multi-sector alliance, an enterprise can help address one of the biggest challenges in any area or region, which is the imperative of nurturing, developing, and further strengthening truly viable social enterprises.

This may well be done, in actual practice, through assisting the partner college or university develop itself as an “incubator” for local social enterprises.

• The incubator within a college or university will need to be inter-disciplinary. It actively looks around at real needs and close-to-realistic opportunities that can be exploited by start-ups or new social enterprises. It then looks for practical ways — often entrepreneurial, game-changing ways — by which those needs can be met and those opportunities seized. Often, some innovation may have to be thrown in for good measure.

• The alliance of civil society organizations and civic groups may be persuaded to volunteer and second some professionals, with practical experience in a given field, who may be able to spend at least a specified period of time on some projects being nurtured by the incubator.

• The alliance may decide to provide temporary start-up assistance to selected projects, adjudged to have the best chance of taking off. Such assistance may well be a mixture of different elements; even the financing package should make provision for returns to be plowed back to the alliance or the incubator, which should be able to sustain itself over the long term.

There are many different modalities by which the college or universitybased incubator can be made to function. But the basic orientation of such an incubator is to spread and nurture social enterprise development. In pursuit of such an orientation, the incubator may conduct practical training on area and market assessment; technology adaptation, with minor innovation; business-like resource mobilization; basic packaging and marketing techniques, etc. In other words, the incubator should become a practice laboratory for social enterprises to be conceived, initiated, nurtured through its initial stages, and finally made to take off and operate completely on their own.

The incubator, with the help of the alliance forged under its auspices, should then help ensure that social enterprises already launched would remain competitive and viable. It is in this light that the incubator should see itself as a resource, providing assistance to social enterprises, which need to constantly reinvent themselves in view of changing market demands, technology advances, and the rigours of financial as well as economic discipline.

It is a demanding and daunting task for incubators. That task can be ably undertaken only through the continuing support of enterprises with a governance and transformation initiative of their own, and with the active collaboration of a strong alliance, forged for the cause of area or regional development.