Guest post by Fiona Descoteaux and Dr Clodagh O’Reilly
Ireland has more than 4,000 social enterprises employing over 25,000 people, according to Ireland’s National Social Enterprise Policy 2024–2027. Across Europe, the European Commission’s Social Economy Action Plan (2021) puts the social economy at 13.6 million jobs, roughly 6% of total EU employment. Recent research (Quaye, 2024) has identified social enterprise as an ideal model for delivering the UN Sustainable Development Goals. By any measure, social enterprise should be considered as a serious part of the economy.
So why are so many of these organisations being quietly set up to fail?
Both Ireland’s National Social Enterprise Policy 2024–2027 and Northern Ireland’s Social Enterprise Action Plan 2023–2026 make the same demand: diversify revenue, reduce grant dependency, and build sustainable trading models. Highlighting the importance of using successful commercial models to sustain the delivery of social impact.
The problem is that most social enterprises were built around grant funding, not traded income. The commercial infrastructure, pricing models, financial systems, governance for growth, and the core infrastructure for scaling were not put in place, and the ecosystem has been slow to address them.
The structural gaps we see repeatedly
Between us, we have spent more than four decades working in and around social enterprise leadership, research and policy. Across that time, the same structural challenges appear with striking consistency.
Social enterprises are hybrid organisations, pursuing social or environmental missions while trading in competitive markets. That dual mandate requires leaders to balance purpose with financial sustainability, often without the commercial infrastructure to do either well.
The most persistent gap is commercial strategy. Many organisations have strong missions and genuine impact but lack defined trading strategies or the operational plans required to support scaling. Without a clear commercial direction, scaling becomes reactive rather than deliberate.
This is compounded by limited market analysis. Competitor positioning and market opportunities are not always assessed systematically, making it difficult to identify where and how an organisation can realistically scale.
Revenue models present another challenge. Where services have historically been grant-funded, pricing structures often don’t reflect the full cost of delivery or the value being created. Organisations end up quietly subsidising their users and undermining their own sustainability in the process.
Operational systems can also lag behind ambition. Without reliable financial dashboards and performance data, leaders making significant strategic decisions lack the visibility that would be standard in any comparable commercial organisation. Increasingly, the tools to address this, including practical applications of artificial intelligence, are accessible to organisations of all sizes, but few social enterprise leaders have had the opportunity to explore what’s relevant to their context.
In effect, many social enterprises are attempting to scale impact without the commercial architecture that enables scaling in any enterprise. None of this reflects badly on the leaders involved. It reflects a sector that has been asked to change faster than the support ecosystem around it.
Who is behind the programme?
Led by InterTradeIreland, the programme is delivered in partnership with two practitioners whose combined experience spans research, enterprise leadership, financial systems and policy development across Ireland’s social enterprise ecosystem.
Fiona Descoteaux leads Unravel Complexity Ltd, a consultancy specialising in commercial architecture, governance systems and blended-finance models for social innovation, place-based regeneration and social economy development. Her career in the sector spans more than two decades, beginning in Glasgow in 2004.
She has held senior leadership roles, including CEO of Ballymun Whitehall Area Partnership and founder of Innovate Communities — Ireland’s first financially self-sustaining social innovation hub, established in 2015, which supported more than 80 social enterprises through incubation and investment-readiness programmes.
She has contributed to national policy development through the Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Taskforce (SEETF) and through leadership within PLANET, the national network of Local Development Companies, both of which shaped Ireland’s first National Social Enterprise Policy.
Dr Clodagh O’Reilly is the founder of Social Enterprise Solutions Ireland and the former CEO of ReCreate, the circular economy social enterprise that pioneered creative reuse in Ireland. A qualified accountant with an MBA from Trinity Business School, her PhD was completed in 2025 at TU Dublin, exploring the factors that a scaling social enterprise needs to consider in order to deliver sustained social impact.
Her research confirmed that successful scaling isn’t driven by mission strength, but by the infrastructure built around it. Her research has contributed to emerging academic literature on social enterprise scaling, bridging practical leadership with evidence-based insight. Through her social enterprise, Social Enterprise Solutions Ireland, she supports mission-driven organisations to strengthen trading models, diversify revenue and build the systems needed to scale while protecting social mission.
What good looks like — and where Europe is heading
The European Commission’s Social Economy Action Plan (2021) signals a clear direction: the focus is shifting from creating social enterprises to scaling them. Across member states, targeted commercialisation programmes are emerging that take seriously the hybrid nature of these organisations — part mission, part market — and design support accordingly.
Ireland has the foundations. What’s needed now is deliberate investment in commercial capability at leadership level: pricing strategy, financial systems, governance for growth, and market development. Not generic SME training, but support that understands the specific constraints and opportunities of mission-driven trading organisations.
Ireland doesn’t need to build that infrastructure from scratch. InterTradeIreland’s new all-island Social Enterprise Leadership, Economic and Commercialisation Training programme is designed to address exactly that gap. Nine months, ten enterprises, structured commercial training combined with executive coaching and cross-border market development.
Applications close 20 March. intertradeireland.com/sales-growth/select
