A new paradigm for business

So­cial en­ter­prises have en­tered a new era. From those first pro­jects, vol­un­tary but with a dis­creet im­pact at the so­cial and eco­nomic lev­els, they have be­come a strong sec­tor, highly com­pet­i­tive and with a great ca­pac­ity for trans­for­ma­tion in areas pre­vi­ously dom­i­nated by an ex­clu­sively mar­ket-based logic. It is not only the so­cial soul that counts, but the over­all vi­sion of the busi­ness pro­ject, the way of un­der­stand­ing the ben­e­fits, the way in which the com­pany is run and what pro­file of en­tre­pre­neurs and man­agers it at­tracts. It is also about the con­tin­u­ous train­ing of em­ploy­ees, their well-being and, above all, it is a mes­sage to the mar­ket: you can con­sume dif­fer­ently, you can buy prod­ucts made using so­cial and en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity cri­te­ria, and you can con­tribute, through your pur­chas­ing power, to trans­form so­ci­ety. The weight of so­cial en­ter­prises has not stopped grow­ing in the economies of the more so­cially ad­vanced coun­tries.

More­over, they are be­com­ing more and more in­flu­en­tial in the busi­ness sec­tor as a whole, and are con­tribut­ing to the tran­si­tion from clas­sic cap­i­tal­ism to an eco­nomic model that seeks the fairest dis­tri­b­u­tion of ben­e­fits and to guar­an­tee de­cent, sus­tain­able and in­clu­sive em­ploy­ment. The num­ber of cit­i­zens de­mand­ing so­cially re­spon­si­ble prod­ucts is grow­ing, and dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­nies have de­tected this de­mand. That is why we must be aware of a po­ten­tial dan­ger that pre­vi­ously af­fected “eco­log­i­cal” com­pa­nies and prod­ucts, in which the change con­sisted in a mar­ket­ing and pack­ag­ing op­er­a­tion rather than a true trans­for­ma­tion of pro­duc­tion/the prod­uct.

What is truly trans­for­ma­tive is the con­sumer’s at­ti­tude, which must play a much more de­mand­ing and doc­u­mented role, and this is also the big chal­lenge fac­ing so­cial en­ter­prises: in ad­di­tion to train­ing work­ers and of­fer­ing prod­ucts, they must also train con­sumers to value and de­mand au­then­tic prod­ucts.