The Role of Socially-driven Enterprise and the Poor in Poverty Alleviation from a Business Model Perspective

Social enterprises are designed from different business models to attend social issues while operating business. This paper aims to examine roles of social enterprises and the poor for poverty alleviation from a business models perspective. The paper will adopt Alter's 2006 Social Enterprise Models as the theoretical framework, which categorizes business models into seven categories. The categories include entrepreneur support, fee-for-service, employment, service subsidization, organizational support, market linkage, and market intermediary. This paper will investigate the role of social enterprises, the role of the poor, the key driver and mechanism of poverty alleviation of each of the business model categorized. The investigation will extend to the literature knowledge of social enterprise's contribution to poverty alleviation from a business models perspective.