Scaling Social Innovation in Europe: An Overview of Social Enterprise Readiness

Social enterprises throughout Europe represent a unique opportunity to fill in social gaps which no other mechanism can cater to. To effectively do this, identifying and scaling successful innovations is crucial, but one-size fits all policies, funding or programs will not be effective, raising the challenge of understanding and mapping out diversity across Europe. The present paper aims to provide an assessment of how integrated the social enterprise sector is based on data collected in the Building a European Network of Incubators for Social innovation (BENISI) program by looking at relationships between the age of social enterprises, financial success, size of teams and strategies to scale.