Social enterprises (SEs) are an important driver for inclusive growth and play a key role in tackling current economic, environmental and societal challenges. Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in social enterprises across Europe, however, still relatively little is known about the scale and sectoral allocation of the emerging social enterprise ‘sector’. However, examples of missing policy and legal frameworks, social investment markets and social entrepreneurship education are very common. As a result, trends in SENSES countries show divers picture of low viability of business models of existing social enterprises, nascent social investors and investment markets, mainly probono and donation-based SE acceleration programmes and fragile relationships between SEs and market actors.
Motivated by the above challenge, the SENSES project aims to create a transnational network of social enterprises (SEs), socially responsible traditional businesses, (social) financial investors, policy-makers, academia, NGO practitioners which will jointly promote an innovative social enterprise model as well as social innovation for the sustainable economic development of the Danube region. Therefore, SENSES will deliver cutting-edge policy designs (Social Enterprise Strategy for the Danube region) that support policymakers in faciliating the social enterprise sector to grow. Results will jointly contribute to develop self-sustaining social enterprises with commercially viable business models that focus directly on propagating effective solutions at grassroot level.
