The abstract, which gives a view of the speech in the ‘Fundraiser 2012’ Italian National Conference is taken from ‘BUSINESS SOCIAL INNOVATION: starting from needs-new path and partnerships for social change’ by M. Crescenzi, a text for ASVI, copyright 2011. The work was born out of an international comparison with the Grameen network, the Italian profit sector, American opinion leaders like Jason Saul, the network of non profit managers and Italian and European Social Innovation.

As opposed to the general sense of precariousness and the scarcity of resources felt by many operators in the sector, we are convinced that the traditional three ‘markets’ – Public (Welfare, EU), Philanthropic (Donations) and Private, still offer enormous development potential for our organisations.

That is to say that providing we move making innovation of products, processes, digital communication and therefore. in general of management.  Considering the public sector more as a resource multiplier, rather than as a distributor.

For example, only on the private market, beyond any logic of a narrow target of the under-privileged, and adding the community request, building social added value which characterises our DNA as ‘social enterprises’, and entering the group of ‘unsatisfied requests’ (i.e. In Tourism), the volume of increase in the invoice level could be of various billions of euro, in Italy alone.

But be careful: in the strong evolution of the activity over the last few years, a new market clearly emerges, which we will define as ‘Social Business Innovation’ (or Social Innovation, or Social Capital Market, etc) extremely rich in enterprise opportunity, as well as different and new categories of stakeholders.

Big Players –such as Social Investment Funds, or the large international foundations such as that of Gates, or the ‘business partnership’ in Social Business of Yunus- that we could call ‘impact buyers’. Those interested in investing in the solution of social problems within an entrepreneurial logic; who consider fundraising an ineffective residual and the non profit organisations who are good at declaring the good cause, but not good at creating real and long-lasting social change.

The emergence of such a multiplicity of players and markets, which go beyond the three traditional “state”, “market” and “social private”, once and for all also buries the sense of the definition ‘third sector’, in which new and robust actors of social change cannot be traced.

To enter in what we have called the ‘social business-innovation market’ our organisations must learn to ‘sell’ their social impact, also built in terms of innovation, and easily measurable in terms of economic and social relapse.

The strategies of ‘Social Business Innovation’ comprise perceptible risks: for example, the companies and entrepreneurs, often millionaires, go ahead alone because they are convinced they will have better results (social impact) than ours- ‘nonprofit people’.

Better than donating money without security and without a specific control of the results, they prefer to invest on the basis of results of the measurable impact.

The non profit can ‘remain in play’ only if they are ‘business partners’ able to maximize the social impact of the programmes thanks to a knowledge of the needs, the territory, and the community.

All this requires re-profiling the managerial competence of the sector in an approach of result based management, with a focus starting with the activities to the results, from the generic ‘making a difference’ to quantifying, and the duration of the difference made.

Read more about the conference (italian site)