An Explorative Study on the Business Models of Social Enterprises
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Wu, Chih-Chieh
Abstract
The development of social enterprises (SEs) in Taiwan is just at the beginning. The purpose of this research is trying to search the potential business model (BM) in healthcare and microfinance as a reference for future social entrepreneurs.
This research starts from differentiating the SEs from ordinary for-profit organizations by two dimensions, namely shareholder/stakeholder-orientation and economic/social impact. Under these two dimensions, for-profit businesses are characterized by high shareholder-orientation with high economic impact while the SEs are positioned as high stakeholder-orientation with high social impact. We then identify two categories of social problems, from which two cases in each category are purposively selected for exploratory studies on their business models.
We found that : (1) The design logic of BM will hinge upon the characteristics of social problems the SE is going to solve. When customers have limited purchasing power, the central task of BM design is to lower product costs and hence profit model becomes the first thing to work out and followed by key processes and resources. On the other hand, when the issue is too high of transaction costs, the central task is to reduce the transaction costs by designing right processes, then followed by setting the price. (2) Both categories of SEs can apply platform concept to improve their existing BM: (a) Pursue potential network effect to build up a two-sided platform; based on the customers SEs have, to find out another customers with indirect network effect and make them pay the bill, just like the case of Google; (b) Make traditional value chain platform, which makes suppliers interact with customers directly, like Amazon.
Subjects
社會企業
商業模式
創新
Type
thesis
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