Assignment brief for Assessment 2: Developing a Social Enterprise

Part C – A detailed project/ business plan (Summative: 30%TMM)

Objective
Creating, delivering and capturing value is what social entrepreneurs do, and to do so they need a ‘business model’ to lay the foundation for sustained earned revenue. Based on your initial pitch, you will apply your entrepreneurial skills to revise, refine and develop your social enterprise ‘business model’ and ensure its potential for both profit and social impact.
Using the business model of a social enterprise can have two key benefits:

  1. To help understand, design, articulate and discuss the ‘nuts and bolts’ of your business concept;
  2. To test and develop a prototype so that you can see if what you passionately believe about your impact and your business actually ‘stacks up’ in practice.

For social enterprises, the business model canvas should provide an opportunity to see not just the business, but also to identify the social impact.

Task
For this third part of the assignment ‘Developing a Social Enterprise’ you will research and develop a detailed project/ business plan for the implementation of a social enterprise based on your pitch (part A), for a social enterprise alongside the feedback (part B) gained from your peers and tutor..

1.Revise your feedback from the pitch and check:

  1.  Is it driven by a social mission?
  2.  Does it generate positive impact/ change for society?
  3.  Is it entrepreneurial as initiative?
  4.  Can it achieve competitiveness on markets through effective planning and management?
  5.  Is it scalable?

2. Test the proposal:

Aim to test your idea in the ‘real world’ by talking to, and getting feedback from your defined stakeholders (beneficiaries, customers, partners etc) on your value proposition.

When doing primary research make sure you are respectful of people’s time and opinions and do not make any promises, but seek out conversations a dialogue with stakeholders as a way to understand and learn more about the situation you are creating your social innovation for.

3. Check your information:

  •  Is the problem contextualized with statistics?
  •  What evidence can you base your idea on?
  •  How specific is the value proposition and does it relate to a direct need?
  •  How does the solution/innovation work with and for local people?
  •  How will you calculate the expected impact on beneficiaries who benefit from the
    solution?

Assignment brief for Assessment 2: Developing a Social Enterprise

1) Beneficiaries/ Customer: Who are you serving? What is your customer and what are his/her
needs and socio-economic circumstances? Their income? Their preferences, needs, behaviours, attitudes? There may be multiple beneficiaries. Be clear about the distinction between beneficiaries.

2) The value proposition: What problem is your customer facing and how exactly you are addressing it? How is the product or service you are providing meeting a real need for your beneficiaries (if there are several, specify how you create value for all)? What are the reasons for your customers/ beneficiaries not being able to overcome the issue or solve the problem themselves? Aim to identify the Product/Market Fit.

3) Deployment/ channel: How you are going to deliver that value to your customers. What will it
take to deploy/ channel the product/service to widespread use among people who need it? E.g. will there be a storefront, partner with existing stores, or will you sell the goods and services online? Or what other access routes are there to reach your beneficiaries.

4) Buy-In/Support (Customer relationships): How do you interact with your clients/
customers? How do you get buy-in and support? How do you build trusting and loyal relationships
and communicate to help sustain the enterprise over time?

5) Mission Achievement/ revenue streams: What is the value you are creating for the sum of all
of the beneficiaries/the greater good, i.e. the social and/or environmental impact? And what is the value created for both the individual and society at large – the enterprise’s social impact?

6) Key partnerships: highlight the relationships that are crucial to your business’ success

7) Key activities: What is your main job to run this business successfully? E.g. Are you developing a technological solution? Are you selling fair-trade goods, training ex-convicts in job skills?

8) Key resources are a breakdown of what inputs you will need to deliver your product or service:
physical, human, intellectual, legal, financial?

9) Mission Budget/ Cost: What are the costs in terms of fix versus variable costs? What are the economies of scale? (e.g. cost per unit decreases with more units produced) or scope (can you produce similar products or services while banking on shared machines, packaging, etc.?).

For more information see:
http://cscuk.dfid.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/BMC-for-Social-Enterprise.pdf
https://www.tbd.community/en/a/business-model-canvas-social-entrepreneurs
https://blog.strategyzer.com/posts/2016/2/24/the-mission-model-canvas-an-adapted-
business-model-canvas-for-mission-driven-organizations