Scaling up social enterprises to tackle environmental problems : A study exploring scale-up challenges, solutions, and opportunities of social enterprises tackling environmental problems

Sammanfattning: AbstractBackground: Among the biggest threats to mankind are various environmental problems which have been mainly triggered by human interference with the planet. There have been various ineffective efforts to mitigate these detrimental effects. Therefore, another solution might come in the form of social enterprises tackling the aforesaid environmental problems. However, to increase the impact, they need to scale up. It is therefore of paramount importance to understand their major scale-up challenges as well as proposed solutions to scale up successfully. Along with that, we also scrutinize further scale-up opportunities to uncover the hidden potential of scaling up. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between social enterprises and their power to tackle environmental problems. We further build on what social enterprises tackling environmental problems must do to mitigate identified scale-up challenges successfully and to be able to seize any scale-up opportunity that comes their way with the main aim of scaling up their positive environmental impact.Method: Ontology – Relativism; Epistemology – Social Constructionism; Strategy –Qualitative, Exploratory; Approach – Inductive; Design – Grounded theory; Data Collection –10 semi-structured interviews; Sampling – Purposive, snowball; Data Analysis – Grounded AnalysisConclusion: Several factors hinder scaling up and solutions to those lie mainly in four key concepts i.e. business idea, value proposition, competency and collaboration. That has been presented in our proposed model (The Hot Air Balloon Model of Scaling Up). We believe that if these four key concepts are well addressed by SEEPs, they are likelier to overcome challenges as well as are in a better position to attract opportunities. Successful scale-up leads to better financial performance along with the overall objective of scaling up the positive environmental impact.