Booklet: Social Enterprise: Entrepreneurship for the Common Good, by ESSEC Professors

In this new booklet by the Council on Business & Society (CoBS), ESSEC professors team up with peers from leading business schools all around the world to study and promote entrepreneurship for the common good.

"At this point in history, faced with the double whammy of global pandemic and climate crisis, humankind has no choice but become more creative, innovative, and collaborative in how we organise ourselves. In terms of impact on the natural environment, business-as-usual was already broken. And then, with one third of the globe’s population in some form of lockdown, business ground almost to a halt. Amidst the calls to get the economy back up and running, there are also calls to rebuild differently – greener and with greater equality for all.  While the pandemic is dreadful, it also brings opportunity for change."

The authors invite us to consider how to adapt this new model to each context, using examples of startups and big corporations, NGOs and cooperatives, ephemeral organizations and others from  North Africa, Ireland, Japan, India, Brazil, Italy, Malawi, Bangladesh, Pakistan, UK, and Spain, among others. And they present us with some of the tools and frameworks developed in the field of social entrepreneurship, such as microfinance, triple bottom line, and crowdfunding, that other areas might benefit from.

"Social enterprise is particularly useful and timely today because it cuts across left-right politics. Following the cold war, the idea and practice of free-markets swept across the globe as the winning ideology of the time. This is evident in the trend of the nonprofit and public sectors becoming more business-like. Since then though, there have been growing calls for businesses to become more social.  We realised that free-markets were not a panacea. And the concept of social business and corporate sustainability emerged as another strand of the social enterprise story. As we strive to build a world in which we would rather live during the most challenging crises our generation has ever experienced, let us take advantage of so much that the field of social entrepreneurship has to offer."

Social Enterprise: A focus on Entrepreneurship for the Common Good
Including contributions by ESSEC Professors Stefan Linder, Thierry Sibieude, Arijit Chatterjee, Arthur Gautier, and Kevin André (E99)
CoBS Publishing
76 pages

For further information, contact Tom Gamble, CoBS Communication and International Projects Manager at ESSEC Business School: tom.gamble@essec.edu.