Publications

Publication: Joining Forces – The Impact of Responsible Business

This brochure was compiled as part of the Interreg-funded project CE Responsible. Empowering Social Business in Central Europe.

This brochure showcases the impact that collaborations between social enterprises and for- profit businesses (so-called altruistic entrepreneurs) can have on their surrounding social and ecological environment.

Each of the partners voted for one project in their country that best demonstrates its contribution to one or more goals to improve social, ecological and economical sustainability on our planet.

It is written for those interested in the processes of cooperation between social enterprises and traditional companies, either to start their own cross-sectoral partnership or to improve an existing one.

This includes stakeholder groups consisting of social and profit-oriented enterprises as well as policy makers, funding organisations, networking organisations, incubation centres and researchers.

The brochure is organised in five sections that should carve out the importance of measuring and presenting impact, from Where We Started (Section I), to explaining Our Approach to Reporting on Impact (Section II), to What We Learned (Section III) and Where We Are Going (Section IV) to finally showing best-practice project examples per country in Stories and Achievements (Section V).

Publication: Sustainable Model for Social Enterprises and Altruistic Entrepreneurs

This analysis provides an insight and a deeper overview of the institutional, legal and business frameworks for social entrepreneurship in countries across the Central Europe Interreg Program area covering Austria, Croatia, Czech Repub- lic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

This document is organized as follows:

Part 1 is dedicated to draft the institutional framework for the Central Europe countries involved in the project, dealing with the implementation of central and local policies for SEs (Section 1.1), the different kinds of financial support (Section 1.2), the emerging of mechanism and agents enabling interaction among SEs, business companies and institutions (Section 1.3), the institutions active in research and training on social economy (Section 1.4).

Part 2 focuses on the legal and normative framework, from the specific legislation in each country (Section 2.1), the legal forms for SEs (Section 2.2), the related benefits and obstacles (Section 2.3), and the description of relevant case studies in the legal field for SEs (Section 2.4).

Part 3 is devoted to describing the business models implemented by SEs in central Europe, using a research of information method based on the PEST approach (Section 3.1). The study considers the governance issue (Section 3.2), the business strategies (Section 3.3), the degree of awareness and the relationships put into practices by SEs in their activity (Section 3.4), and the innovative solutions realized in their fields (Section 3.5).

A final section of Conclusions summarizes the main outcomes of the study and gives back the policy recommendations for implementing a sustaina- ble framework model for SEs in the participating regions.