The new shape of fundraisng: a change in financing and harnessing both entrepreneurial and social needs

The interest among scholars about social impact is growing faster, because of nowadays changes in the entrepreneurial and business framework. Taking the necessary differences, the study about the new emerging social entrepreneurship movements and theoretical antecedents by Shaw and Carter (2007) underlined how the new shape of social enterprises is tending to the for-profit characterization. This view agrees with Porter & Kramer (2011) idea about a reinvention of capitalism towards a structure characterized by businesses shaped around the creating shared value concept, to unlock the next wave of business innovation and growth. Tout court, there’s no more need of a trade-off between profits and social needs. That means a new way to intend and measure the impact of for-profit activities on the society. The International Committee on Guidelines & Principles for Social Impact Assessment (ICGP), in the year 2003, defined social impact as “the consequence to human populations of any public or private actions that alter the ways in which people live, work, play, relate one to another, organize to meet their needs and generally cope as members of society. The term also includes cultural impact involving changes to the norms, values and beliefs that guide and rationalize the cognition of themselves and their society”. According to Slootveg et al. (2001) and Estévez et al. (2013), social impact could be deconstructed into two main concepts: social changes and human impacts. The two concepts are strongly related through a causal relationship, that affects the decision-making processes and the capture and measurement of social impact itself, because of social criteria that may be both positive and negative, depending on the changing perceptions (Burdge & Vanclay, 1995; Vanclay, 2002). Social impact concerns the outcomes that hit a specified community in terms of social performances that could be translated in the wide spread social value, that means the result of the social enterprises activities on their stakeholders. In contradiction with financial values, the social ones are qualitative and less rigorous, that implies that social impact may be not easy to measure (Bull, 2007; Nicholls, 2009; Arvidson et al., 2010; Lane and Casile, 2011; Barraket and Yousefpour, 2013). However, Bagnoli and Megali (2011) argue that there is a strong relationship between inputs and organizational processes of an enterprises and the outputs and outcomes that identifies the social impacts. .. [edited by Author]