Empowering and sustaining social enterprises
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Loading... - Bagaskoro Irawan
- 07 Sep 2022
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Social enterprises are driven by a social mission and actively seek financial viability to self-sustain in the market. Social enterprises exist with two distinctive missions or a double bottom line — a clear social mission to tackle targeted underprivileged communities, and a well-designed business model for market development that is comparable to conventional businesses. They are the third sector after the public agencies and private enterprises to complement the social innovation ecosystem of the nation.
To create social impacts, social enterprises are extensively driven by their entrepreneurial orientation, social salience, proximity to community, and more importantly, the social agenda that defines the identity of the enterprises in social value creation and dissemination. They adopt business models that are underpinned by the principle of a community-led needs-benefit strategy. An example is the inclusive employment model in which a social enterprise hires the targeted beneficiaries (e.g., disabled unemployed people) to work with them. Another is the so-called Robin-Hood model, that is, the cross-subsidisation model in which the wealthier customers will pay a full price (or maybe slightly higher) to cross-subsidise the lower-income community.
Social enterprises in Malaysia
Since 2021, the specific role of social enterprise development in Malaysia has been under the purview of the Ministry of Entrepreneur Development and Cooperatives (MEDAC). Prior to that, the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) and Yayasan Inovasi Malaysia (YIM) were key agencies to foster a conducive entrepreneurial ecosystem for social enterprise development, alongside other ventures such as tech startups. In 2021, MaGIC was merged with Technology Park Malaysia and named MRANTI (Malaysian Research Accelerator for Technology and Innovation) to focus on the acceleration of research and technology commercialisation. Read More...
