Scaling up social businesses in developing markets
By Nancy M. P. Bocken, A. Fil, Jaideep Prabhu. 2016
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Most of the world's poor live in developing markets and face unmet needs in core areas such as education, health, energy, sanitation and financial services. This offers businesses a vast opportunity for growth as these economies emerge from low-income to middle-income status. Social businesses in particular address a social need while generating profits typically reinvested into the business itself, but there is limited understanding of the ways through which social businesses achieve scale. This paper investigates how social businesses can scale up. First, we define scaling up as “increasing the number of customers or members of a business as well as expanding its offer and maximising its revenues until it reaches millions of people.” Second, using three in-depth case studies of social businesses that successfully scaled up according to these definitions, BRAC, Aravind and Amul, we identify scaling up strategies for social businesses. We identified market penetration, market development, product development and diversification as key strategies at different stages of business maturity. We find that there are two ways of increasing income generated that are linked to these four strategies: increasing revenue per stream and diversifying revenue streams. Our findings give insight to companies aiming to pursue social businesses and adds to the sparse literature on scaling up social businesses. A fruitful future research avenue would be to investigate the best sequence for applying these scaling strategies across companies and sectors over time.
Subfields: Business and International Management, Management of Technology and Innovation, Marketing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fdf17fa3c2afeb0a369d98ce34db5eaa13c3eae
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In Business and International Management
In Management of Technology and Innovation
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Citations in the corpus
- Balancing a Hybrid Business Model: The Search for Equilibrium at Cafédirect (2018, background): “The whole field of sustainable business models demonstrates the nature of this integrated approach to managing multiple forms of value capture which sheds new light on the dimensions of hybrid organizing (Baumgartner 2009; Bocken et al. 2016; Rauter et al. 2015).”