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BUSS 2087/BUSS 5445: Social Enterprise Case Competition

1. About this guide

Your assignment is to develop, as a team, an idea for a new business with a social responsibility focus and write a business plan. This guide contains tips and resources to help you create a case for your business idea.

Please refer to your course outline and LearnOnline site for full assessment details.

2. What is social entrepreneurship?

Social entrepreneurer
Someone who designs and implements a new method, process, product, or service that addresses a social or environmental challenge.
Social enterprise
A company or organisation that provides a social product or service at a fee. The main differences between a social enterprise and commercial enterprise are the nature of the product or service, the fee, and the distribution channels, all of which are crafted to maximise access for underserved individuals and populations.
Social innovation
The act of pioneering new methods, processes, products, and services that address social and environmental challenges.

3. How to create a business plan

  A business plan helps you....
1. Define your business
2. Understand the market
3. Define your product
4. Outline go-to-market strategy
5. Create an operating plan

This advice is from the LinkedIn Learning video course (1 hour 11 min) on Creating a business plan. Watch it for tips on getting started with your plan.

4. Company and Industry Information

Have a look at our online guide to finding Company and Industry Information.

This guide will help you search the web and our databases to find company and industry information, financial information, annual reports and country information.

5. Other sources of information

Business Source Ultimate helps you locate scholarly and industry information covering all business topics.

This is an example of an Advanced Search using Business Source Ultimate.

You can limit your search by date range and to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals from the box on the left hand side of the results screen.

The Library Collection can be a useful starting point in locating academic references. It searches across the Library’s collection of print and electronic books, DVDs, journals and theses, together with journal and newspaper articles.

When planning your search, try:

  • "double quotes" for phrases
  • truncation* to find the plural and other forms of a word
  • connect using AND, OR and NOT

Catalogue search for "recycled plastic" AND industry

From the results list you can:

  • Limit to articles from Peer-reviewed Journals
  • Limit by Publication Date, e.g. 2014 to 2019
  • See the full text for many items by selecting the title, then look for the View Online access links

Google Scholar searches only within academic or scholarly sites, rather than over the whole internet like a regular Google search. For more information on using Google Scholar, have a look at our Searching for your Literature Review Guide.

By accessing Google Scholar via the Library, you can directly access articles through the Library by clicking on the Fulltext at UniSA links.

6. How to write your case

Now that you have done your research it is time to put all of your information together.

Watch this short video (2 min 53 sec) for tips on how to write a report or access the overview document at the bottom of this box.

 

7. Referencing support

Managing your references

What do you do with all those references you have found? Use a bibliographic management software to store, organise and cite your references.

There are many free systems available. The Library supports the bibliographic management tool EndNote. For more information see the EndNote guide.