11 OCTOBER 2016 : ROUND TABLE "ASSESSING THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP"

The round table "Evaluation of the Social Impact of Social Entrepreneurship", held on the 11th of October 2016, was an opportunity to share with the 110 participants from Hauts-de-France, Belgium and Ile-de-France, the challenges linked to the European project on the Valorisation of Social Impact of the Social Entreprises (VISES) and, more broadly, the societal challenges to which the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) must respond.

The enterprises of the SSE can rely on projects like VISES to design tools for the valorisation of their social impact. This valorisation involves the evaluation of their strategy and the communication about their practices and processes to all of their stakeholders (customers, workers, private or public funders), all the while evolving to better meet their goals and anchor them within society. The two entrepreneurial case studies at this round table, Waak and 4Werk, emphasised this.

VISES must also be seen as a process of co-creation open to others, in dialogue with stakeholders, as well as financial and institutional partners of the SSE. The discussions that took place on the 11th of October, and the presentation of the work of the Caisse des Dépôts, the Comptoir de l’Innovation and BNP Paribas around the impact measurement tool "MESIS", emphasised this desire for co-creation.

VISES has essential characteristics that are shared by its 21 partners, along with its institutional supporters, and that we hope to share more widely. Specifically, VISES :

• is a cross-border project : the challenges facing our societies go beyond the administrative boundaries of countries and regions. Going beyond the national context allows us to build a framework for social entrepreneurship, to focus on the heart of the SSE, its practices, processes, values and results. However, this is not an isolated process, disconnected from what is developing elsewhere ;

• is a project that stems from activities on the ground : a re-appropriation of the issues of valorisation by the enterprises themselves. It is an experiment conducted with companies to meet their needs ;

• uses a cooperative method of co-creation between different actors of the SSE (federations, companies, financiers ...) in different sectors and regions, pursuing manifold purposes ;

• involves testing various methodologies and tools ; it is about developing tools for valorising and highlighting the practices and processes of the SSE, and evaluating their results, without aiming at developing a single evaluation tool for control and measurement that would focus only on quantitative aspects.