Nov 18, 2014
By Claudio Cortellese
While it is easier to start a social enterprise today than it was 10 years ago, thanks to more options for networking, support services, and raising funds, it is still very challenging for social enterprises to scale their operations and impact. At the same time, social intrapreneurs – employees within corporations who develop practical solutions to social or environmental challenges– face constraints to scaling their concepts both inside and outside the company. Unlocking scale requires new collaboration between businesses, governments, academia, specialized consulting firms, impact investors, and civil society to establish a robust ecosystem.
The inaugural Scaling Corporate Social Enterprise Conference taking place in Santiago, Chile on November 20-21 is a first step towards bringing these different ecosystem actors together in the Latin American context in order to identify the barriers to scaling corporate social ventures and develop a common agenda to overcome them.