Challenges of collaboration between social enterprises and for-profit organizations

Abstract

This research was among the first to investigate the challenges between social enterprises and for-profit organizations in the Netherlands looking at two sides of the collaboration. A lot about those partnerships remains unknown. Semi structured in-depth interviews were performed among 11 social enterprises and 8 for-profit organizations and analyzed using the coding program NVivo. Challenges at social enterprises included several cultural challenges, challenges related to different interest, practical challenges and challenges of dealing with misconceptions. Looking at for-profit organizations, challenges were found to be process related, content related, outcome related and related to working with the social target group. Challenges were found to differ per type of collaboration and the most important reason for collaborating turned out to be the quality of your product or service. Focus points were indicted for both parties to be able to improve their cooperation.