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Business support for social enterprise

The Office for the Third Sector and the nine English regional development agencies commissioned a mapping exercise of the business support services available to social enterprises across England. The final report, ‘Mapping regional approaches to business support for social enterprises’, by research agency Rocket Science, highlights some excellent examples across the the regional development agencies and some key recommendations for the sector.

Lessons from existing practice

The report highlights lessons from existing practice about how business support for social enterprises can be improved – for example:

• There is an acknowledgement that some specialist support will still be required but this should be fully connected with Business Link's Information, Diagnostic and Brokerage mainstreamed service.
• Mainstream business support should be sensitive to social enterprise needs, context and motivation.
• Promoting and sustaining social enterprise activity requires proactive specialist support for pre-start social enterprises.
• The capacity of the business support infrastructure to disaggregate the sector is vital to providing effective support.
• Business support providers have an important role in helping social enterprises to understand and use financial products to their full advantage.

Key steps to achieve success

The report found that the success of the social enterprise agenda is reliant upon social enterprises not just meeting needs, but also doing this while thriving in sustainable markets and successfully generating income through trading. The report identifies a number of key steps to achieve this success, including the need for:

• clarity within each region about which agencies are providing what support at each stage of development
• consistency of service within and across regions
• the empowerment of social enterprises to choose between support offerings
• the further development of business support for social enterprise, which should focus on building on what already works

The report recommends better organised learning and the sharing of good practice among all the regional development agencies at national and regional levels to ensure that social enterprises across the country receive a high quality service relevant to their needs.

The findings in the report will help to inform the development of proposals on how best to utilise the additional business support funding for social enterprise announced by the Office of the Third Sector in the social enterprise action plan in November 2006.

• Mapping regional approaches to business support for social enterprises – final report [PDF 1.2MB, 83 pages]
• Mapping regional approaches to business support for social enterprises – summary report [PDF 308KB, 13 pages]