Managing capability renewal in social enterprises: human resource roles, competence gaps and work-embedded training
Argyrios Loukopoulos, Aikaterini Sotiropoulou, Dimitra Papadimitriou, Francisco Javier Gómez González, Marina Abril-Berodas, Natalia Marzia Gusmerotti, Daniele BinciPurpose
Social enterprises must renew business models while balancing social impact, commercial viability, collaboration, digitalisation, and stricter sustainability and impact demands. Yet dynamic capability and social entrepreneurship education research offers limited guidance on how these pressures translate into human resource roles and competence development across vocational education and training and lifelong learning. This study maps how business-model change reconfigures human resource design and competence needs in European social enterprises, arguing that effectual, partnership-based training builds adaptive capabilities.
Design/methodology/approach
Sixty semi-structured interviews with higher-education professors, vocational education and training trainers, and social enterprise managers were conducted in Finland, Greece, Italy and Spain using maximum-variation purposive sampling. Data were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis, using country, role and organisational maturity as lenses.
Findings
Business-model hybridisation, platform- and data-enabled coordination, and stronger sustainability and impact-measurement demands prompt role redesign, especially boundary-spanning functions linking beneficiaries and customers, and new mandates for impact modelling, digital coordination and green-transition work. Competence needs combine transversal skills, including collaboration, communication and socio-ethical sensitivity, with digital business models, data analytics, business intelligence, sustainability accounting and impact measurement. Gaps in languages, legal and accounting literacy, advanced data skills and bid writing constrain funding, compliance, experimentation and scaling.
Originality/value
The study integrates dynamic capabilities, competence development and effectuation theory to explain capability renewal in hybrid social enterprises. It offers a role-linked competence and training framework, highlighting work-embedded micro-credentials, service learning and co-creation studios as mechanisms supporting capability development among leaders, educators and workers, informed by evidence from four countries.