Social enterprises are globally recognized as innovative organizations that find adequate solutions to various social problems and needs. They act in a way that provides goods or services on the market in an entrepreneurial and innovative way and uses the realized profit primarily to meet social goals. The method of managing an entrepreneurial entity is open and includes employees, users and other stakeholders affected by the economic activity of the entrepreneur. The basic values of a social enterprise are fairness in the ownership and distribution of wealth, equal opportunities for participation, solidarity with people around the world, honesty in achieving goals, open business and balance between market operations, and social responsibility.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines social entrepreneurship as entrepreneurship that seeks to provide innovative solutions to existing social problems and therefore often goes hand in hand with social innovation processes aimed at improving people’s lives by promoting social change. Social entrepreneurship as a new way of doing business is an area of overlapping entrepreneurial practices from the business world and values closely related to social responsibility and environmental principles. Only entrepreneurs have the will and perseverance needed to transform the entire system. The task of a social entrepreneur is to recognize problems in society and find new ways to solve them by changing the system, expanding solutions and convincing the whole society to take new steps. We can say that social entrepreneurs strive to change communities and society as a whole.
| SOCIALLY OWNED ENTERPRISE | CLASSIC COMPANY |
| empower employees/community | supervise and control employees |
| democratic decision-making | decision-making based on the number of shares |
| environmental responsibility is a fundamental principle of action | they do not see environmental / community responsibility as their responsibility |
| conducts financial audits and measures social impact | conducts financial audits |
| driven by commercial, social and environmental goals | driven by commercial goals |
In addition to social entrepreneurship itself, there is also socially responsible business – a business concept in which companies voluntarily and without any legal coercion seek to align their business with the needs of society in the broadest possible sense. We talk about CSR when a company, above the strictly prescribed obligations, integrates care for the environment and society into the decision-making system. Thus, good business results cease to be the only measure for evaluating the company’s success. Today, a larger or smaller share of socially responsible businesses is an integral part of the business policies of almost every major and serious company in the market. However, not every company that applies socially responsible measures is also a socially-owned company. There is a fundamental difference between social enterprises in the narrower sense of the word and for-profit enterprises that are still applying (to a greater or lesser extent) the principles of socially responsible business. For a profit-oriented company, social and environmental goals, although very important, still represent secondary or subordinate goals in relation to profit generation.