The 9th EMES conference on “Act locally, change globally: Social enterprises and cooperatives for more resilient economies and societies” promises a four-day experience full of exciting workshops, thought-provoking parallel sessions and panels, and four inspiring plenary sessions. These plenaries will cover the latest developments in social enterprise, cooperative, and social innovation research across the globe.
One of the plenary speakers, Sven Giegold, will join us on Tuesday, September 12th, during the semi-plenary “SE in transformation” together with Zarah Bruhn ,Commissioner for Social Innovation & founder/CEO of socialbee and Maja Göpel, political economist Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany). Having been a MEP at the European Parliament for a long time with a portfolio firmly including SE, Sven Giegold, in 2021 became one of three Secretaries of State to the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action.
As we exchanged in preparation for the #9EMESconf and he shared with us some of his thoughts regarding the conference and proposed topic “SE in transformation”.
What do you find interesting about this conference?
EMES aims to bring together people from different fields: Researchers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. This is a very important aspect. The challenges our societies are currently facing are enormous. Hence, we need to leverage all the good ideas put forward by social entrepreneurs to address the challenges of climate change, migration, demographic change and so on. But to fully develop their impact, social enterprises need an environment that does not hinder and paralyse them but encourages and enables them. This is where researchers can help identifying success factors for business, provide knowledge and insights to aspiring entrepreneurs, and policymakers can use the input from conferences like this one to develop better-informed policies.
Where do you see social enterprises and cooperatives contributing to the common good (Gemeinwohl)?
Social enterprises can be found in almost any sector. Of course, there are focal areas: housing, climate change and environmental protection, health, education, and integration of disabled persons or refugees, to name but a few. But this list can never be complete, though. Wherever new challenges for society arise, social enterprises are created to meet them. That’s the beauty of this sector. It’s not centrally planned, but its impact on the common good is created by people who see urgent issues in our society and develop solutions for them. This also was the impetus for the first cooperatives in Europe that then spread their impact globally.
What can science contribute to the further process of policy-making for common-good-oriented Enterprises?
Research can support policy-making for social enterprises on several levels: First, we need further insights into the state of social enterprises in general. In Germany, we lack insight into their size, and their economic and social impact. Projects that help identify, track and evaluate them can be very useful. Second, the impact is the social enterprises’ currency. Suitable support programmes designed by policymakers must take into account the impact of a social enterprise or evaluate the impact of its policies. This can only be done through impact measurement. We need more (standardized) tools that help social enterprises measure their impact and that are able to aggregate these measurements on a larger scale. Only by showing that social enterprises actually make a difference, we can shift the discourse towards more impact entrepreneurship. Support from the research community is urgently needed here.
Visit our 9EMESconf Plenary speaker’s page to discover other speakers that will join us.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to Frankfurt!