Engaging Stakeholders to Achieve Greater Adaptability

Synergies:

• Engage stakeholders in devising a coherent value system that works for all and reduces exclusion.
• Use stakeholder choice as an adaptability mechanism, similar to how consumer choice plays an important role in setting market trends.
• Instead of a top-down approach to addressing a social problem, use a distributed approach that seeks to provide products and services that support additional grassroots innovation (e.g. providing modular solutions that can be customized at the local level).

Tensions:

• Be mindful not to engage some stakeholders while overlooking others, creating a culture in which the social enterprise activity is seen as “the place to be” while traditional social work is seen as a dead-end, undermining social staff morale.