Advancing Sustainable Business Models For Social Enterprises: Conceptual Development And Empirical Insights [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

Social enterprises with their dual value creation currently play a vital role in tackling social and environmental problems while contributing to economic development and fostering innovation. Although a substantial body of research exists on this subject, insufficient attention has been given to examining how the structure of their business model shapes the factors influencing social enterprises. The way social enterprises design and align their business models to support dual value creation remains relatively underexplored. In such context, the socially extended business model canvas provides a promising framework for embedding the complexity of social components into the model; however, its conceptuality and applicability have not been sufficiently analyzed. Therefore, the dissertation addresses a significant research gap by exploring how social enterprises adopt this extended canvas to sustain both social and economic value creation. Methodologically, the dissertation is organized around three interconnected study. Study 1 focuses on conceptual development, using a systematic literature review to refine the theoretical blocks of the extended canvas. Study 2 utilizes an empirical case study to examine the effectiveness and feasibility of the extended canvas in a real-world social enterprise context. Recognizing that social impact components are the most challenging to execute, Study 3 adopts a Q method study to explore founders’ and managers’ interpretations of social impact measurement and identify the key factors influencing their implementation efforts. The findings imply that advancing sustainable business models for social enterprises requires embedding social value creation in their business model and core missions through the socially extended business model canvas with six key components (Study 1); the canvas works in practice (Study 2) and one of the canvas’s key components (social impact measurement) is interpreted differently by actors and shaped by multiple contextual and organizational factors (Study 3). This dissertation bridges the gap between theory and practice, making significant conceptual and empirical contributions to the field of socially extended business models.