No description available.

In crowdfunding, funders often have very little or no information about the social entrepreneur and the venture. This asymmetric information hinders funding in that potential funders only make a pledge if they can trust the entrepreneur and the seriousness of the project. Thus entrepreneurs have to signal information to potential funders. In the case of conventional ventures, this means showing that the company is committed to the financial returns or the quality of the product, for instance. However, in the case of social enterprises, entrepreneurs can signal their commitment to a social or an environmental challenge. The information that entrepreneurs want to convey to potential funders depends very much on the type of crowdfunding. The type of crowdfunding determines whether the entrepreneur is pitching to potential investors, lenders or potential consumers and general supporters of the project. While investors tend to be more concerned with the financial returns, the quality of the product or service tends to be the variable that matters most to the potential consumer. This thesis examines the crowdfunding campaigns of social ventures in order to understand how to crowdfund social enterprises. It identifies the signals with which, social entrepreneurs try to attract funding through different types of crowdfunding, mainly reward-based. It finds that reward-based crowdfunding offers a good basis for social entrepreneurs to attract funding by advertising and signaling their commitment to social or environmental issues. This is all the more true when the social enterprise seeking to be crowdfunded only aims to be financially autonomous and thus cannot offer attractive financial returns to potential investors.

A number of families suffering from alcoholic consequences constantly increase. More and more children suffer from the lack of their parents’ care, emotional repulse, compulsion and poverty. Though the childhood is so short the experience gained at that period of time, joy survived and bitterness suffered leaves the foremost marks and most frequently decide the future ways. The aim of the specialists of the social spheres is to help these children to prevail the basic difficulties, which menace their social course. The goal of this final post – graduate work is to disclose the features of social with the children dependent on their alcoholic parents.

This dissertation is one of the earliest to systematically apply and empirically test the resource-based view (RBV) in the context of nascent social ventures in a large scale study. Social ventures are entrepreneurial ventures organized as nonprofit, for-profit, or hybrid organizations whose primary purpose is to address unmet social needs and create social value. Nascent social ventures face resource gaps and engage in partnerships or alliances as one means to access external resources. These partnerships with different sectors facilitate social venture innovative and earned income strategies, and assist in the development of adequate heterogeneous resource conditions that impact competitive advantage. Competitive advantage in the context of nascent social ventures is achieved through the creation of value and the achievement of venture development activities and launching. The relationships between partnerships, heterogeneous resource conditions, strategies, and competitive advantage are analyzed in the context of nascent social ventures that participated in business plan competitions. A content analysis of 179 social venture business plans and an exploratory follow-up survey of 72 of these ventures are used to analyze these relationships using regression, ANOVA, correlations, t-tests, and non-parametric statistics. The findings suggest a significant positive relationship between competitive advantage and partnership diversity, heterogeneous resource conditions, social innovation, and earned income. Social capital is the type of resource most significantly related to competitive advantage. Founder previous start-up experience, client location, and business plan completeness are also found to be significant in the relationship between partnership diversity and competitive advantage. Finally the findings suggest that hybrid social ventures create a greater competitive advantage than nonprofit or for-profit social ventures. Consequently, this dissertation not only provides academics further insight into the factors that impact nascent social value creation, venture development, and ability to launch, but also offers practitioners guidance on how best to organize certain processes to create a competitive advantage. As a result more insight is gained into the nascent social venture creation process and how these ventures can have a greater impact on society.

This study is within the field of impact investments. Impact investors relates to a twofold requirement of both financial return and positive impact from investments. The purpose of this study is to investigate how impact investors assess impact in their investment evaluation processes and how impact is aligned with the requirement on financial return. Literature have addressed the problem of assessing and quantifying impact, but it fails to tell us how impact is incorporated in the pre-investment evaluation of different investment opportunities. The field of impact investments is increasing in popularity among investors and through a qualitative study based on eight semi-structured interviews with impact investors in Sweden, we try to gain insight in how they address the twofold incentive of both financial return and impact.Our findings show that impact investors apply similar evaluation processes as mainstream venture capitalists with the additional assessment of social impact. We find that investors approach the impact assessment in different ways and that there are split views on the ability of measuring impact in the pre-investment phase. The task of combining the financial measurements with impact is found to be challenging due to the contradicting characteristics of the two, as well as the difficulty of measuring social impact. Often the impact aspect is integrated as a pre-investment evaluation “gate”, where a subjective assessment is central. We contribute to literature by addressing the identified research gap and we aim to contribute to social entrepreneurs’ understanding of how investors relate to impact in their investment decision making processes.

Over the last three decades, scholars in management, policy, and geography have examined the growing economic, social, and spatial impact of the financial sector. Venture capital firms have been a focus, generating a contested but deep literature around the roles of such "value-adding" capital providers in supporting the growth of firms, industries, and various territorial innovation models. In parallel, there has been substantial government support-financial, regulatory, and otherwise-of these private sector financial intermediaries, despite scepticism. The past twenty years have seen the emergence and rapid growth of analogous funders in the third sector, itself the realm of substantial experimentation and growth. These new intermediaries, "venture philanthropists", have become important players in shaping, structuring, and channelling funding to the third sector. The activities and effects of venture philanthropists are underexplored, as are their growing interactions with governments-despite intentional and striking similarities between the evolution of venture capital and that of venture philanthropy. This dissertation addresses these gaps by systematically examining the emergence, evolution, and operational practices of two influential British venture philanthropy funds: the first such fund in Europe (Impetus Trust) and the first fund in the world co-created with the state (Inspiring Scotland). The two venture philanthropy organisations (VPOs)-one with roots in venture capital, the other with roots in the voluntary and government sectors-both conducted the venture capital-inspired operational model of venture philanthropy in similar ways. That said, the VPOs reflected the logics and practices of their founders and funders. Impetus Trust more closely resembled early-stage venture capital, with a reliance on London-based networks, funders, and service providers-and a heavily London-focused portfolio. Inspiring Scotland evidenced the logics of government rather than charity in several instances, with substantial original research into social issues, heavily structured portfolios on set timelines, and regionally-distributed staff. This approach broadened access, allowing support of SPOs and their clients across various (and underserved) geographies, but limited options for opportunity-driven or expressive functions of philanthropy. I surveyed the CEOs of most organisations supported by the two venture philanthropy funds (82 of 98 charities and social businesses), supplemented by interviews of selected CEOs and the founders and staff of the two funds. I find that, overall, the two VPOs each engaged in seven core activities of venture capital, intentionally adapting them to the third sector: sourcing and selection, due diligence, an engaged relationship, provision of funding, provision of non-financial support, creation of network linkages, and intentional exiting of relationships. As in venture capital, this process had broader effects: providing signals of investee quality, preparing investees for subsequent funding, and expanding networks. The combination of long-term relationships and high formal reporting requirements imposed significant costs for SPOs-and also created a virtuous cycle of trust and collaboration between VPOs and SPOs. The venture philanthropy model also had broader societal effects, creating data regarding individual organisations and the efficacy of responses to social issues, which in both cases informed policy. As intermediaries, venture philanthropists decreased power differentials and improved the flow of (oft-anonymized) information amongst funders, statutory bodies, and funded organisations, facilitating several types of collaboration. SPO managers indicated that they received, on average, approximately ten different types of non-financial support-like strategy consulting, human resources support, or legal counsel. These managers reported in interviews and surveys that the non-financial services provided by venture philanthropists were highly valued, on average. Further, managers believed these services provided more value than it cost the VPOs to provide them. Likewise, managers highly valued most forms of new networking connections (though not all services or linkages were found to be valuable). Smaller SPOs valued services and network links more highly than larger SPOs, although all sizes of SPOs indicated both were valuable, on average. Importantly, this data was provided by SPO managers and focused on the SPO-VPO dyad-rather than provided by VPOs and focused at the portfolio or trust level. This filled an important gap in the literature: academics and practitioners often lament that the voices of charities supported by foundations are not often enough heard, which limits our understanding of many aspects of organizational philanthropy and its effects-in particular the burdens and benefits for recipient organisations. I documented the co-creation of the first government-supported venture philanthropy fund through eleven interviews with founding managers and government officials. This model, in which state, private, and civil society actors collectively founded and funded a value-adding capital provider, militates against neoliberal assumptions of an ever-diminishing state, as does the leveraging of private resources in alignment with state aims-though it raises concerns around democratic processes, accountability, and local control. This work helps inform the changing nature of the voluntary sector and its relationship with the state. I focus on the increasing interaction of actors between and across systems-sometimes in new roles and coordinated by new intermediaries-in the allocation of resources and delivery of services in the public interest. These new interactions inform broad bodies of work that seek to understand changing sectoral roles, most notably discourses surrounding neoliberalism(s), financialisation, and public management. Overall, I find privately- and publicly-funded venture philanthropy playing a role in the third sector analogous to the role of venture capital in the private sector, with similar practices and concomitant effects in data generation, network formation and strengthening, facilitating partnerships, and signalling the quality of supported organisations. By examining two such emerging models of capital provision, I contribute grounded understanding of the way such systems are created and function across the private, public, and third sectors.