The Role of ICT-Enabled Social Enterprise for Promoting Social Investment

Abstract

Europe is facing unprecedented challenges, from globalisation to migratory flows, changing family structures, ageing populations, inequality and social exclusion, unemployment, and so on. To meet these challenges, we need to modernise EU social protection systems by expanding the social investment dimension of social spending, while taking advantage of technological advancements and multi-stakeholder partnerships to drive change in the welfare system. Within this context, this chapter focuses on the role of Information Communication Technology (ICT) enabled social enterprises for promoting social investment. First, we outline the social enterprise landscape in Europe, going beyond fuzzy concepts to highlight the key characteristics of social enterprises that make them important for social change. Second, we outline key ways in which social enterprises are using ICT in their activities to achieve varied socio-economic goals: from using social media to scale up, to improving organisational management, and expanding service offerings in healthcare, education, the labour market, and other social fields. Our analysis is based on findings from our study on the role of social enterprises in delivering ICT enabled social innovation initiatives promoting social investment approaches, carried out by the authors in the framework of the European Commission’s ICT-Enabled Social Innovation (IESI) project. (See https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/iesi.) We find that ICT-enabled social enterprises are particularly important for social investment, given their ability to combine technological and social innovation, and their focus on meeting community-specific needs that can be scaled up. We encourage research and policy commitments to further test and validate how social enterprises can catalyse public-private partnerships for the delivery of public goods to safeguard our Social Europe.