Similarities and Differences between Social Venturing Co-operative Entrepreneurship Business [SVCE-bm] Model and New Generation Co-operative Business Model [NGC-bm]

Abstract

The innovations in the New Generation Co-operative business model (NGC-bm) have effectively ameliorated the traditional co-operative business model headache. Having started in United States of America, the NGC-bm has been adopted with minor variations in many developed counties such as Canada and many European countries. The application of NGC-bm in agribusiness has brought about the desired social-economic benefits to co-op members and the business model has proved to be just effective as the investor owned firms.

However, by unveiling similarities and differences between NGC-bm and social venturing and co-operative entrepreneurship business model, the paper argues that SVCE-bm unlike the NGC-bm is best suited for developing countries like Zambia that are characterized by adverse economic and social challenges affecting smallholder farmers and weak institutional framework. SVCE-bm is in its infancy but gives hope as an alternative business model to the traditional models that are based solely on main stream economic theories, the classic and neo-classic theories, to accelerate socio-economic development of agribusinesses in developing countries.

The paper starts with the introduction, the theoretical framework and methodology. It then looks at the traditional co-operative business model (TC-bm) weaknesses and proceeds to look at how NGC-bm has ameliorated the TC-bm weaknesses and further compares the NGC-bm with SVCE-bm.