Social entrepreneurship in Russia: current state and development features

Purpose: this work aims to analyze the current development of social entrepreneurship in Russia, identify the characteristic features that accompany the development of the phenomenon, and analyze the financial sustainability of modern Russian social enterprises.

Methods: to achieve the stated goal, theoretical research methods – abstraction, analysis and synthesis were used. With the help of these methods, first of all, for the theoretical basis of the concept (review and evaluation of existing approaches to the definition of a phenomenon and similar concepts, as well as developing definition for research purposes), identifying problems of the conceptual apparatus and criteria in practice. As a result, the issues of qualitative and quantitative research of the phenomenon in Russia, as well as for a comparative analysis of social enterprises, supported by a specialized fund in 2015 (data provided by SPARK database). The paper also applied methods of empirical research, economic and, in some cases, financial analysis, namely, a comparison of companies in the sample of interest using the general methodology of financial comparison of enterprises. Within the framework of the study, the composition, direction and lifetime of social and entrepreneurial projects are analyzed using the example of a specific sample, and a formal, legally formalized representation of enterprises of social entrepreneurship in the Spark database.

Results: the study showed that at the current time the analysis of the activities of many social enterprises is significantly hampered by their chosen organizational and legal form of activity, many enterprises are unstable or have ceased operations.

Conclusions and Relevance: the study found that modern social enterprises have a heterogeneous composition and often a very unstable financial situation several years after receiving support. This result allows us to conclude that it is necessary to test the initial hypotheses on a larger sample. So, the further study of the conditionality of the duration of the "life" of the social enterprise with the initial parameters of the enterprise, such as, for example, the organizational legal form, and also the dependence of the duration of active entrepreneurial activity on the chosen social orientation – after all, small and medium enterprises themselves are rather unstable structures. Based on the conducted research, a hypothesis is also put forward on the need for comprehensive and long-term support of social and entrepreneurial projects. 

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