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Research into business support provision for social enterprise

The Office for the Third Sector (OTS) and the nine English Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) commissioned a mapping exercise of the business support services available to social enterprises across England. The final report by research agency Rocket Science highlights some excellent examples across the RDAs and some key recommendations for the sector.

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 (IDB) 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.
• Finance for social enterprises – in particular, the role of business support providers in assisting social enterprises to understand and use financial products to full advantage.

The report finds the success of the social enterprise agenda is reliant upon social enterprises not just meeting needs, but doing this while thriving in sustainable markets and successfully generating income through trading. Some key issues to ensure this success would be:

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

The report recommends better organised learning and exchange around good practice among all the RDAs at a national and regional level to ensure that social enterprises across the country receive a high quality service relevant to their needs.

The report findings will help to inform RDAs' development of proposals on how best to utilise the additional business support funding for social enterprise announced by OTS in the social enterprise action plan last November.

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