Research On Social Enterprise Business Model

The social enterprise originated in the developed countries of Europe and the United States in the1980s, it is a market-based solution to social problems through innovative means and achieved great success. Social enterprises with enterprise nature and sociality is able to maintain its own sustainable development while achieve social goals. The emergence of this form of organization is successful in solving the complex social issues faced by the government, the market and not-for-profit organizations for the government failure, the market failure and the voluntary failure phenomenon, stimulates economic growth and the eradication of poverty, play an important role in solving the employment problem, improving the social environment. Along with the enhancement of corporate influence in the international community, China’s social enterprises have gradually developed. Recent years, the practice of social enterprises shows that the development of social enterprises in China has made great progress. However, the scale of most social enterprises is also very small, facing a lot of problems such as a shortage of funds, lack of innovation in organizational forms, low competitiveness. Therefore, how to solve the problems above and build a competitive and sustainable social enterprise becomes very important.In recent years, studies have shown that the business model has great effect on keeping the enterprise competitive advantage and long-term development. But the business model is more concentrated in general business and e-commerce businesses, few scholars are concerned about the social enterprises business model. Therefore, in order to explore how social enterprises to maintain long-term competitiveness, the paper introduce the business model to social enterprises to conduct investigations.In research methods, this paper uses the case study method for this method enjoys a natural advantage in terms of inquiry; what’s more, the social enterprise business model has no mature theoretical framework, so is suitable for cases study method. This paper selects a typical successful social enterprise in China-"Xuping Rabbit" as a case material to explore the elements of its business model and innovative power, aims to explore how to create its own unique business model to achieve sustainable development and achieve its social mission.Eventually, based on the analysis of Xuping Rabbit, this paper summarize the elements of and the innovation power of the business model of social enterprise. This not only enriches the existing social enterprises, but also provides theoretical support for China’s future social enterprises in how to build their own unique business model. The study shows that social enterprises showed great uniqueness in its five elements-value proposition, target customer, core competencies, organizational design and network of partners. The five elements ensure the competitive advantage of the social enterprise business model together. The value proposition the most central elements of the social enterprise business model includes commercial value proposition and social value proposition and determines the target customer, the organization’s core competencies and the organizational design; The value proposition must be the primary consideration of the organizational design, the organization design also supports social enterprise’value proposition, good organization design can maximize social enterprise business value and social value; Core competence supports the realization of the dual social enterprise value proposition and ensures the sustainable development of the social enterprise; organization design supports the core competence sustainability and replicability; the establishments of partners’network make it a platform for the integration of resources, to help achieve the optimization of the value proposition. Meanwhile, we found the needs of the society and the social entrepreneurship is two base impetuses of the social enterprise business model creation and innovation.