Barriers to entry?
According to a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers of 100 board-level executives of social enterprises and private sector organisations...
...more work needs to be done to improve contact and dialogue between these two sectors to realise their full potential for public service delivery. With Whitehall determined to transform the UK’s £79bn public service market by widening choice, lowering cost and improving service delivery, the third sector has a unique opportunity.
The findings from the research revealed ‘enormous potential for partnership working’ and the majority of respondents advocate closer contact between the sectors, with actual collaborative working as the means of doing so.
Encouragingly, the survey highlighted an overall belief that partnerships between social and private enterprises would lead to benefits for end users in terms of innovation, customer focus, and value for money in the delivery of public services.
Barriers to partnering include a lack of understanding between the sectors, and a lack of ability to measure social return by commissioning entities. The other problem is the lack of capacity and scale of operations on the part of social enterprises. One private sector respondent observed: ‘Social innovators being ideas and not scale. Ideas, with the scale of the private sector, will bring the best results.’ However a third sector respondent cited the values chasm as a major hurdle: ‘Voluntary organisations are value driven and the private sector is profit driven and this creates a tension…’
New partnerships for public services – can collaboration between social and private enterprise deliver?
www.psrc-pwc.com.
Author: Clarissa Dann
Clarissa Dann was the editor of Caritas as well as an HR and management online service,he People Bulletin until July 2011.
She is now the editor of the specialist trade finance magazine, Trade and Forfaiting Review which can be viewed at www.tfreview.com but does write on charity finance and investment from time to time.
Clarissa has a background in legal and professional publishing, as well as business journalism and holds an MBA from
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