Mapping the practice of impact measurement. A quantitative study on social enterprises

The growing interest toward the topics of social entrepreneurship and social impact assessment makes the issue of measuring performance ever more important. In fact, despite the existing divergent perspectives, there is one commonality across all definitions of social entrepreneurship: the underlying drive to create social value, rather than personal and shareholder wealth. Since social enterprises have the potential to add value on different societal dimensions - economic, social and environment, measuring and monitoring these values is a preconditions. This work present an exploratory research developed to understand which organizations’ feature are more likely to be connected with the willingness of social entrepreneurs to measure the generated impact. To meet this purpose, a logistic regression analysis was carried out using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data on social entrepreneurship. The main aim was to understand how social entrepreneurs who claim to be actively involved in processes of impact measurement perceive their organizations in terms of social mission, innovativeness and market orientation.