Venture philanthropy: what are the ideal-type social enterprise's characteristics? A case-study

Abstract

The fields of Social Entrepreneurship and Venture Philanthropy have been increasingly discussed in the scientific literature. The former concerns organisations at the crossroad between business and social worlds, which want to produce social or environmental impacts. The latter uses techniques borrowed from the fields of business and finance and applies them to philanthropy in order to support more efficiently socially-oriented innovative organisations. Both are developing relatively new disconcerting practices. However, their interaction raises a number of questionings and, as far as we know, very few academics have already studied the matter. Therefore, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon through this Master Thesis and, especially, to investigate the ideal-type Social Enterprises’ characteristics being championed in the Venture Philanthropy sector. To do so, this work first reviews transversally, according to the Social Enterprises’ schools of thought, the available academic literature on Venture Philanthropy, analyses a specific case-study in depth, and compares their different Social Enterprise’s visions. From a theoretical perspective, we affirm that every paper conveys a “hybrid” ideal-type, which matches features from multiple schools. From the practice perspective, our results show that the vision is also hybrid and that it does not entirely match the theoretical ones. Additionally, our Thesis provides encouraging results, such as new ideal-type features, which allows us to believe that further research regarding other cases would generate more characteristics, and progressively shape more accurately the ideal Social Enterprises’ visions promoted in Venture Philanthropy.