Social Startup Cockpit: Measuring impact of social start ups

What motivates you to conduct this research?

On 13 September 2023, the German federal government adopted its first National Strategy for Social Innovation and Public Welfare-Oriented Enterprises, which defines skills development and the establishment of impact orientation and impact measurement as key areas for action and current challenges for social entrepreneurs in Germany. At the same time, funding agencies and investors increasingly expect proof of the benefits and impact of the companies they support. In order to make social impact visible, measurable and communicable, impact analysis and measurement play an essential role right from the start-up process.

What is the starting point?

Many social start-ups lack the knowledge and appropriate tools to systematically integrate impact orientation. According to the German Social Entrepreneurship Monitor, over 60% of the social enterprises surveyed carry out an impact analysis, but 66% of them stated that they had developed their impact management system themselves without support. Parehk/Attuel Mendès (2021) have also shown that social innovations and social enterprises (SI/SU) that are characterised by a high level of knowledge of the problems and needs of their target groups are often insufficiently thought out in economic terms. Although social start-ups usually have well-developed impact-oriented solution ideas, there are often shortcomings in the design of revenue models and a sustainable financial basis for the company. Sven Ripsas outlined his initial ideas for linking financial and social (social, environmental) indicators in his 2020 textbook ‘Das Start-up-Cockpit’ (The Start-up Cockpit).

What are the specific goals of the project?

At the HWR Berlin, the ‘Social Startup Cockpit’ project is investigating the extent to which interdisciplinary social startup teams can increase their implementation success using the cockpit method, thereby increasing the number of startups in the field of social entrepreneurship and their likelihood of success.

This raises two research questions for the SSC project:

1. Can a university generate more public welfare-oriented initiatives and start-ups through a Social Lean Startup Sprint (SLSS) focused on SI/SU?
2. Can the entrepreneurial skills of SI/SU founders and the likelihood of (follow-up) financing be improved through a Social Startup Cockpit (SSC)?

How does the project team intend to achieve these goals?

The Social Startup Cockpit (SSC) research project is divided into five milestones:

1. Design of a Social Lean Startup Sprint (SLSS)
2. Cross-university mobilisation of participants
3. Organisation of two coaching workshops with network partners and SLSS participants
4. Retrospectives with qualitative interviews about SLSS/SSC experiences and evaluation
5. Design of a TTT workshop concept ‘SSC’ for universities and SI/SU initiatives

Building on the format of the ‘Lean Startup Sprints’ successfully introduced at Startup Incubator Berlin in recent years and the textbook ‘Das Start-up-Cockpit’ (Ripsas 2020), the ‘Social Startup Cockpit (SSC)’ is a new, user-centred tool for impact analysis and business model development that is currently being developed and tested. Taking into account the needs and specificities of social startups, the SSC combines impact metrics such as CO2 reduction or social return on investment (SROI) with business metrics such as liquidity range in months (runway).

As part of a ‘Social Lean Startup Sprint (SLSS)’ in November 2023, participants from the SI/SU sector will be mobilised to validate their ideas for public welfare initiatives with the help of the SSC. Through the transfer of expertise in the area of impact and business model development and the participation of external social entrepreneurs and network partners in upstream and downstream workshops, potential for improvement will be identified and exploited at an early stage.

Until February 2024, participants will be accompanied in a retrospective process lasting several months and interviewed in qualitative interviews to determine the extent to which the SLSS and the SSC have helped them to design an optimised impact and business model. The documented project results will be compared with current findings from entrepreneurship research and combined into an incubation process oriented towards social entrepreneurship.

The development of a two-day train-the-trainer workshop prototype, which teaches the methodological elements of the SLSS and the contents of the SSC, will enable other universities to use the findings from the SSC project in the future and thus ensure more successful social innovations and SI/SU start-ups.

Contact

Department of Business and Economics
Prof. Dr. Sven Ripsas
Professor for Entrepreneurship

E sven.ripsas(at)hwr-berlin.de