Role of Corporate in Promoting Social Enterprises

Social enterprise is an entity that leverages economic activity to pursue a social objective. It interacts with various institutions, in its ecosystem, as it tries to solve the social problem. These institutions could positively or negatively influence the performance and growth of the social enterprise. Ecosystem framework is important for social entrepreneurs as they depend on external institutions for several resources. This support may be financial, access to expertise and information, training and education programmes, organisations and personal development, and networking opportunities. In this paper, we explore the role of corporate as an institution in supporting social enterprises. Through a qualitative exploratory study of six social enterprises operating in India, we identified four primary modes through which corporate directly supports social enterprises, at its different life cycle stages—incubation, grants, investment (debt or equity) and market linkage. The study also reveals that the mode of support varies with life cycle stage and also level of engagements of corporate varies across these different modes. This paper contributes to the field of social enterprises and its institutional support framework. The study is useful for practitioners to navigate potential collaboration between corporate and social enterprises The study also provides an initiation point for future research possibilities on the topic of collaboration of corporate and social enterprise from perspectives of a corporate, and the end beneficiary.