In recent years there is a growing interest in support for social innovations that aim at fixing social problems or satisfy social needs. Especially new financial instruments are debated that are about facilitating social innovators. Also in Germany there is a growing heterogeneity in financial instruments for social entrepreneurs available. But until today there is just a poor understanding of the field of social finance, the corresponding investor types, their motivations and expectations. We believe this is caused by the broad approaches often undertaken in the field. This is why we narrow down our focus on the challenges social mission organization leaders face with different social investment types available in Germany. Deriving from our findings we suggest a more refined understanding of the social finance landscape in Germany. Key to our approach is to differentiate social mission organizations not according their current income model, but according their potential of their business model to repay loans and interest in the future. In our conclusions we argue for a more balanced discourse regarding different types of organizations and against an often expressed favour of financially self-sufficient social innovators. [Authors' abstract].
Schmitz, Bjorn and Glanzel, Gunnar (2013) Resourcing social innovation in Germany - an empirically based concept of matching social innovators with social investors (Paper presented at the international conference Social Frontiers : The next edge of social innovation research, at GCU's London Campus on 14th and 15th November 2013).
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