Abstract
In recent years, the interest for social enterprise is on the rise. However, various opinions exist regarding the definition of social enterprise and there is no unified clear definition at the moment. The concept slightly differs depending on countries/areas.
In Japan, a social enterprise is widely recognized to hold the following three characteristics: social mission, social business and social innovation. This is also the definition used for Japanese government’s industrial policy.
However, the meaning is vague and does not clearly explain the characteristics of the social enterprise. In this paper, I first critically evaluate this definition.
I propose that social value rationality, business sustainability as well as the relationship between social value and sustainability to be additional criteria for a company to be considered a social enterprise.
Next I examine this based on a case study.
