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Between Social Values and Profitable Performance: The Case of B-Corporations

Objective

How entrepreneurs could profit from social responsible investments? This issue implies a balance between entrepreneurs’ investments in profitable business models and their engagement in non-profit social actions. To address this question, the project studies the B-Corporations as a new legal business form of corporations (private and public) pursuing benefits for society and shareholders. A non-profit certifying organization, B-Lab, analyses the impact of these companies on society, with particular attention to their ability to provide to ‘communities’ beneficial products or services. Although first established in US, now they are present in 34 countries across 121 industries. Employing this legal form of social companies, the proposal exploits the notion of community-focused strategies (CFS) to refer to the actions that entrepreneurs should pursue to establish links with communities to fulfill reciprocal social values. If people join communities to satisfy their identity needs, entrepreneurs might seek to align their ventures’ strategy to them to improve entrepreneurial performance. Building on social identity theory, entrepreneurial and strategy research, this project adopt mainly a demand-oriented approach. First, it tries to explain differences in new ventures’ performance investigating how B-Corps interact with their communities and through them access customers’ information and gaining loyalty. Second, it explores and profiles the B-Corps as new examples of social entrepreneurial ventures. Finally, it studies entrepreneurs’ strategies to develop long-term interactions with the communities. The statistical evidence is drawn from secondary data, surveys to entrepreneurs, and lab experiments. Implications on ventures’ success rate, growth and drawbacks of the interplay between social entrepreneurship and CFS are discussed.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2014

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Coordinator

IE UNIVERSIDAD
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 158 121,60
Address
CALLE CARDENAL ZUNIGA 12
40003 Segovia
Spain

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Region
Centro (ES) Castilla y León Segovia
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 158 121,60
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