The Four Lenses Strategic Framework is not meant to be authoritative nor static. It is meant to support a practitioner-driven debate to further define common components of the social enterprise methodology. In the context of this paper social enterprise is defined as: “a socially-oriented venture (nonprofit/for-profit or hybrid) created to solve a social problem or market failure through entrepreneurial private sector approaches that increase organizational effectiveness and sustainability while ultimately creating social benefit or change.1” It follows that social enterprise methodology is comprised of “the methods and organizing principles underlying the study of social enterprise.”
At the core of the framework is the concept of sustainable social impact, the end goal which drives the social entrepreneur. Here, we intentionally do not give a comprehensive definition of the concept and set no boundaries.2 Instead we focus on the concept of sustainable social impact and identify four common themes—we call them performance criteria—that appear to propel many social enterprise practitioners in their pursuits:
The four performance criteria act as references around which social enterprise practices can be identified, organized, compared, and possibly formalized into methodological components. In doing so, the framework serves to identify, around the four performance criteria, social enterprise practices that seek to leverage private sector strengths while addressing private sector limitations and market failures.
Upon closer study of the performance criteria, the framework then offers the following analysis: behind each performance criteria lies a set of activities that can be grouped in four strategic areas—we call them strategic lenses:
While each performance criteria relates directly to each of the lenses, the extent to which one impacts the other varies. For example, resource mobilization is the most critical strategic lens for issues pertaining to generating blended value--but if all types of resources (i.e. human, social, physical, natural, and financial) are not fully mobilized and managed, then the social enterprise will invariably miss opportunities to maximize economic and social value creation. Resource mobilization is also important toward achieving depth of impact but to a lesser extent—a social enterprise could conceivably create impact without mobilizing all its potential resources. Thus, each performance criteria has a primary lens, although to get the most out of performance, each criterion should be carefully filtered through every strategic lens.
Once performance criteria and critical strategic areas common to social sector organizations are identified, the framework can be used to examine the interplay between strategic actions and performance, and how the two together, or in opposition, lead to sustainable social impact. When performance criteria are refracted through the strategic lenses, interdependent relationships between strategic action and performance outcome become evident. Relationships between strategic actions may be synergistic and thus leveraged to have a greater positive effect on performance, or by contrast, strategic actions may underscore inherent tensions within the lenses that must be managed to achieve the desired performance outcome.
This paper aims to move beyond stories and definitions to structure social enterprise performance. Its task is to inform and inspire new thinking about formalizing a performance methodology to help practitioners achieve efficient, adaptive, strategically-minded organizations capable of simultaneously creating economic wealth and social value and addressing root causes of social problems in order to achieve deep, lasting social impact.