Analysis · Business
Why Business Support Partners Can See New Funding as Competition
By AWEI · AI-compiled · Published · Analysis prepared · 1 source · doi.org
A centrally funded business support program can look like competition to the regional organizations expected to help deliver it. In their 2023 paper on Indonesian social entrepreneurship, Hari Harjanto Setiawan and colleagues describe precisely this friction: regional stakeholders initially rejected the central initiative because they regarded it as a rival.
Published as an Opinion article in Frontiers in Sociology, the paper reports semi-structured interviews with 26 informants, conducted from September to December 2022. They included officials, business incubators, facilitators, entrepreneurs and beneficiaries across four regencies. The authors combined interviews, observation and document review, organizing the material around stakeholder engagement. This provides an account of implementation, not an experimental test of growth.
The revealing detail is how the authors describe the disagreement being addressed. Informal discussions helped participants identify shared aims and a way to incorporate the central initiative into regional program arrangements. In this account, cooperation involved adjusting how the program fitted existing work, rather than merely securing agreement to participate.
The division of responsibilities also complicates the idea that partners simply complement one another. Government supplied funding and shaped plans, while non-state organizations brought practical experience in supporting businesses. The authors interpret some delivery work as substitution: outside organizations performed tasks that state institutions could not accomplish themselves. A partner list alone would obscure that distinction.
These observations do not establish that discussions caused cooperation or improved business performance. Only four beneficiaries were interviewed, and the locations cannot represent Indonesia as a whole. Implementation covered one fiscal year, leaving longer-term effects unclear. The paper’s expectation that involving more stakeholders would benefit participants should not be treated as a demonstrated outcome.
For managers expanding similar business support programs, the useful question is specific: does each new partner add capacity, fill a delivery gap, or overlap with an existing program? This account offers reasons to investigate those roles before treating a larger partnership as evidence of greater capability.
Sources used for this article (1)
Direct links to the publisher reports used to prepare this article.
- Source 1
- Scaling up social entrepreneurship to reduce poverty: Exploring the challenges and opportunities through stakeholder engagement Hari Harjanto Setiawan, Tauchid Komara Yuda, Badrun Susantyo …
