Policy Brief on Scaling the Impact of Social Enterprises – Policies for Social Entrepreneurship

The policy brief addresses how policies could contribute to the process of scaling social enterprises’ social impact. Social enterprises are mainly concentrated in specific niches and are not evenly spread geographically and as such their potential is far from being fully realised. With increasingly diversified social needs, there is a call for a bolder presence of social enterprises that can help solve social issues. Public policies should therefore acknowledge social enterprises’ capacity to generate value for the community and make supporting their scaling efforts a key objective. However, scaling social enterprises remain a challenge for all entities and stakeholders and many questions must be addressed in order to assess whether a particular enterprise is worth scaling or not. Thus, this policy brief attempts to address such questions in two ways. It first looks at a number of strategies currently used by social enterprises to scale their impact before discussing the challenges encountered in this endeavour and the potential policy responses that could help overcome them.