Societal impact is a hot topic in many places in the world. This is also true for both the Netherlands and Türkiye. Through UNIC4ER, researchers from Impact Centre Erasmus (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Koç University Social Impact Forum (KUSIF) found each other. Over the last few months, and together with a researcher from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, they collaborated with societal partners TSEN, MVO Nederland and EUCLID Network and engaged the impressive number of 37 individuals from 32 organizations. The goal of the project: to investigate the challenge to go from impact-ambition to impact-achievement for impact-driven enterprises, using a management concept which hasn’t before been applied to these kind of businesses.
The first part of this collaboration, partially funded with seed funding from UNIC4ER, is ending. We talked with two involved researchers, Agata Fortuna – senior project and training specialist from KUSIF – and Marit Schouten – impact researcher from Impact Centre Erasmus – about the project, collaboration, and results so far.
Can you tell something about the research?
- Marit: “In short, from organizational theory we learn that in an ideal situation an organization sets a goal, devises policies to attain those goals, implements those policies into practices and activities, and that leads to an outcome. And in this ideal situation, the outcome is the same as the initial intended goal. We call that “coupled”. However, there are many reasons why there might be some decoupling between those different steps. When policies and practices (means) aren’t aligned with the intended outcomes (ends), we call that means-end decoupling. This concept has not been applied before to impact-driven enterprises: enterprises with a mission to have a social or environmental impact. These organizations have set up their entire enterprise with the goal to attain that outcome, yet we do not always know if that outcome is indeed attained. We wanted to therefore explore if applying the concept of means-end decoupling on these impact-driven enterprises will lead to new insights.”
- Agata: “In our project we wanted to explore further the concept of means-ends decoupling in the context of social enterprises and test the relevance of this concept with different stakeholders in the social entrepreneurship ecosystem in both countries. Applying this theory can be useful to analyze various factors affecting the impact achievement of social enterprises.”
How this collaboration come about?
- Agata: “Koç University Social Impact Forum is a practice and research center on social impact and impact management (IMM) established in 2012. While working to increase the capacity of various social impact actors on IMM and sustainability, we have a special focus on social enterprises. We have conducted and contribute to research on social impact and social entrepreneurship in Türkiye with an aim of supporting the growing ecosystem with data to inform policies and support mechanisms. As UNIC4ER is promoting the cooperation between universities, when we learn about the engaged research funding proposal, we decided to reach out to Impact Center Erasmus, that we heard a lot about but did not have a chance to work with before.”
- Marit: “Researchers from KUSIF reached out and the connection was quite immediate. There were a lot of similarities between our two institutes and the conversation on what questions we have on social impact and might be interesting to jointly investigate flowed naturally. However, we’re both institutes that are responsible for our own funding so creating a new partnership from scratch, getting to know each other, and investigation interesting research avenues wasn’t something we could do without some financial support.”
- Agata: “Unfortunately our first application for UNIC4ER seed funding at Koç University was rejected despite both teams bringing not the academic knowledge combined with practice, and having extensive networks in Türkiye and the Netherlands. We see the potential of exploring the means-ends decoupling not only for academic purpose, but also to contribute to dynamically developing policies and standardizations attempt regarding social impact measurement and management in social enterprises, but also in wider social economy setting. So we did not give up, we stayed in touch, and when opportunities presented itself, we re-applied for founding, this time through UNIC4ER at Erasmus Rotterdam University.”
- Marit: “We had great support from the UNIC team here at EUR, Marcos and Esther helped us in making sure our proposal reflected our research aim and we were very happy to get seed funding to formalize our collaboration.”
Why did you want to get involved in this research?
- Marit: “I have been researching the concept of means-end decoupling in a few Dutch contexts and was really curious to apply the concept to a new target groups as well as see if there would be differences between such different institutional and cultural contexts of The Netherlands and Türkiye.”
- Agata: “As a social impact practitioner I work with impact-driven enterprises on IMM and impact strategy development. I also have been involved in some conceptual work and discussions on standards on IMM and impact valuation. I believe exploring means-ends decoupling can add new perspective to my practice.”
In the short time, the project engaged 37 people from 32 organization, of which around half from impact-driven enterprises? How did you do it?
- Agata: “Involving stakeholder is our modus operandi at KUSIF. Due to nature of our field, and the social impact itself, we need to engage, collaborate and cocreate with stakeholders. Therefore, KUSIF is a member but also cocreator of networks bringing organizations working in the social economy field. Over the years we have managed to build the network that we could benefit from during our research, allowing us to reach and include wide array of organizations, including social enterprises, intermediary organizations ecosystem support and impact investors.”
- Marit: “Yes, the same applies to the Impact Centre Erasmus in the Netherlands. In addition, I also think our research is just hitting the right spot. While we have a good network, I was still surprised how people with extremely busy scheduled were willing to make the time. They seemed to immediately understand the importance of the question we were asking and wanted to have a conversation with us and with peers to get a better understanding of this challenge – and sometimes dilemma – between impact ambitions and impact achievements.”
What is the biggest take away for you?
- Marit: “For me it’s really that we need to be cautious with the route that the European Commission, the OECD and other important institutions are taking with the standardization of impact assessment. I think from this short investigation we are already seeing that while this might be great to get profit-driven enterprises to be transparent on their impact, for impact-driven enterprises it might mean more time proving specific impact that takes resources away from learning and having their desired impact.”
- Agata: “I’m social impact practitioner. What drives us, is helping organizations to improve what they do and maximize social value they create. We are talking about dynamically developing field, yet difficult to frame due to its subjectivity. Such research as ours helps add some new layers to my understanding of social enterprises and their practices on IMM, boosting further discussion by applying theoretical and critical approach to current practices and solutions.”
What is the relevance of the research?
- Agata: “In my opinion this research is highly relevant for academia and practitioners – social impact actors and policy developers. Marit already mentioned the interest of stakeholders who got involved, but I want to highlight it. The interest and contributions of stakeholders prove high relevance of research and need of exploring it further.”
- Marit: “I think academically we have established there is a gap in extant literature where we are contributing to both social entrepreneurship literature as well as furthering the concept of decoupling. And practically, I think impact-driven enterprises are challenged by this. They WANT to have a positive impact, they want to attain their goals, and getting a better understanding on how to best do this, can be of service to the social entrepreneurship eco-system.”
Many universities are looking into how they can create more societal impact. Both Erasmus University Rotterdam and Koç University are working on this. Engaged research is seen as one of the ways a university can do this. As researchers who have just done engaged research, how could this kind of research be supported further?
- Agata: “I believe such bodies within universities as Impact Centre and KUSIF have a potential to help academic institutions to create more societal impact. However, I do not think the universities use such expertise enough. I think one of the reasons is the interdisciplinary character of our work and combining the academic and practice. The struggle is real when it comes to financing engaged research as our work do not fall easily into the categories of existing funding opportunities. When initiating our research we did not avoid the struggle and it continues as we would like to carry on.”
- Marit: “Yes, I agree. I do believe there is movement in universities, with more room for engaged research, action research, transdisciplinary research, but it is slow, and it can be hard to get results published. UNIC is a great example of how universities can support this, but UNIC provides limited seed funding, which can get a partnership like ours off the ground, but not support a long flight.”
What’s next for you and this collaboration?
- Agata: “We are looking forward receiving feedback on our results, engage more stakeholders.”
- Marit: “First we want to disseminate our results, both to practitioners as well as an academic paper. We hope that we get can additional funding to move ahead from there.”
