ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the development of social enterprises (SE) and their ecosystems in Europe. It provides the nature of social entrepreneurship and SEs. The chapter focuses on some of the policy implications and offers suggestions on how to improve the study of social entrepreneurship, SEs, and social innovation. The neoliberal turn initiated during the 1980s still shapes the manner in which many European welfare regimes try to reinvent themselves. The chapter shows that Albania, Austria, France, Poland, and Serbia have statist-macro ecosystems, due to the predominance of state institutions in delivering support to the SE ecosystem. SEs operate in different sectors, they take on different legal forms, their capacity to remain and stay compatible in the market differ, and they are often dependent on external funding. Social innovation, another context-dependent phenomenon, often involves actions, frameworks, models, systems, processes, services, rules, organizational forms, and sometimes products.
