Business strategy to drive social enterprises’performance: a pioneering quantitative study

Prior literature determined four business model elements as driving forces behind social enterprises’ performance; customer structure, stakeholder relationships, scalability and innovativeness. This study quantitatively researched the relations of such elements to the social enterprises’ financial and social performance. Contrary to prior believes this study solely found statistical evidence for stakeholder relationships and scalability as performance drivers. Stakeholder relationships showed a positive relation to social impact depth while scalability established a positive relation to social impact breath. Moreover, scalability also had a positive relation to financial self-sufficiency. This study’s results acknowledge the importance of the venture’s age, size and international focus as moderating effects. Finally, the results of this study and their relation to the hypotheses clearly advocate for favouring the stakeholder theory over the resource based view and evolutionary economics theory within the field of social entrepreneurship.