Social Enterprise, Finance and sustainable Development

A few EU directives and national laws enacted during the last decade, as well as the empirical evidence of market experiments, lead to think that a new way to manage the enterprise and a new system of financing the firm are underway. Since the origins the enterprise goal has been to make profits for the partners, but the late Nineteen Century experience of the co-operative movement made clear that an economic activity can be performed for purposes beyond the profit. At a time when the co-operatives are stressing their limits there is an area where not for profit firms can act to serve needs of the communities, being a market third answer to the problems, different from the traditional alternative between the State and the market. The idea of letting a number of small not for profit firms surge, at low incorporation costs, is also a way to create jobs, through self employment, and the creation of new EU fund structures like the so called ELTIF, EuVECA and EuSEF is a way of creating a financing environment which can breed the new initiatives