A ‘Tripadvisor’ for disability? Social enterprise and ‘digital disruption’ in Australia

We explore how social enterprises can use platform technologies to plug ‘informational gaps’ in the provision of disability services. Such gaps are made more apparent by policies promoting self-directed care as a means of giving service users more choice and control. We use a case study of a start-up social enterprise seeking to provide a TripAdvisor style service to examine the potential for social innovation to ‘disrupt’ current models of service. The case study suggests that any disruptive effects of such changes are not due to new digital technology per se, nor to novel platform business models, but rather rest in the manner in which the moral orders which justify current patterns of social disablement can be challenged by social innovation

Measuring impact in social entrepreneurship: Developing a research agenda for the ‘practice turn’ in impact assessment

Organisations with explicit social missions such as social enterprises, impact investors, nonprofits, and foundations are under increasing pressure to illustrate the impact of their activities on the social problems they claim to be addressing. These trends have resulted in an increasing sophistication of attempts to measure, assess, and report social impact across sectors. However, research in the field of social entrepreneurship has not sufficiently addressed the complex nature of impact assessment, nor how it is enacted in everyday organisational activities. This chapter aims to explain how practitioners cope with the complexity of impact assessment in their everyday activities. Drawing on practice theory, this chapter argues that impact assessment should be grounded in everyday experience and practice. This chapter builds on the emerging evidence of, and develops a research agenda for, the ‘practice turn’ in impact assessment in social entrepreneurship

Impact Investment and the Sustainable Development Goals: Embedding field-level frames in organisational practice

This chapter aims to understand whether and how impact investment, a novel approach to financing social and sustainable entrepreneurship, is aligned with, and contributing to, the sustainable development goals (SDGs). We theorise the SDGs as a ‘field-level frame’, a cultural template guiding social and environmental change. We analyse performance data of impact investors both in Australia and globally and map this impact data to the 17 SDGs. We find that impact investors are engaging with language consistent with the SDGs a possible field-level frame to guide impact strategy and measurement. To date, impact investors measure social outcomes more frequently than environmental outcomes; this may be explained, in part, by our analysis that reveals some SDGs create greater points of leverage to generate layers of impact across SDGs. This chapter explains how impact investors are engaging with the pursuit of the SDG agenda