What Are The Commonalities of Successful Social Enterprises? -- An Empirical Study Based on B Corp Impact Data

This paper focuses on 5,210 B corporations and aims to answer the question of the common features of successful social enterprises. By studying the common features of successful social enterprises, this paper successfully depicts the picture of B Corps' status quo and their impacts. To capture the features of successful social enterprises, I classify them based on their performance with K-means Clustering and use TF-IDF to find the mutual features of social enterprises in the same cluster. In conclusion, I find significant differences in governance, environmental impact, and community engagement among social enterprises in different industries and countries. For example, social enterprises in the Manufactured Goods, Retail, Wholesale, and Agriculture sectors perform poorly in terms of employee satisfaction assessments; social enterprises in the service sector perform poorly in terms of environmental concerns and lack sustainability concerns. This study provides a reference for policy development for social enterprises and policymakers in different sectors.

B Corp Impact Data: https://data.world/blab/b-corp-impact-data