Social Entrepreneurship as a Force for More Inclusive and Innovative Societies: Cross-Country Report

Between April 2015 and December 2015, the SEFORÏS consortium surveyed over 1000 social enterprises in Hungary, Romania, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Russia and China. This means that thanks to the diligent cooperation of social enterprises and funding from the European Union, we have been able to launch the world’s largest and most rigorous panel database on social enterprises. This report presents key findings for all the countries investigated. Where possible, we compare findings to the 2009 SELUSI survey, the predecessor of the SEFORIS project. The SEFORÏS database is unique in its scope and depth. In our conversations with social entrepreneurs, we discussed in detail topics, ranging from their innovation habits to their perceptions of the market in which they operate. It is also unique in its methodology – we adopted a special type of snowball sampling method, called respondent driven sampling, which allowed us to survey a representative sample of social enterprises in each country through tapping into their networks. Finally, our database is unique in its rigor as we took meticulous steps to ensure highest data quality. This report is designed to help social entrepreneurs benchmark their organisation against fellow social enterprises worldwide. We hope the report can help social enterprises to better place their organisation (e.g. what makes it distinct; readily spot differences and similarities with their peers). The report will also be useful for support organisations and policy makers to obtain an overview of social enterprises across 9 countries.