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What’s a Transition Enterprise?June 1st, 2012 8 comments

These aspirational criteria help define what is meant by a Transition Enterprise (TE). We think this definition is useful because it helps us clarify the kind of trading enterprises we would like to see, as they best support the wider aims of Transition. It can also help us decide where we might first direct our limited resources, in terms of support.

 

Other types of commercial enterprises can also help meet the aims of Transition. In fact, a wide range of business models in each local economy can help provide the diversity that helps build resilience, including privately owned for-profits and ‘regular’ social enterprise.

However we wish to focus our efforts on the TEs at this time as they best align with the aims of Transition, and are under-represented. Your other local economic partners may wish to focus on supporting other types of businesses.

You are welcome to refine this definition for use locally, and please share this with us if you do.

 

Transition Enterprise definition

 

A Transition Enterprise (TE) is a financially viable trading* entity that fulfils a real community need, delivers social benefits and has beneficial, or at least neutral, environmental impacts.

*  viability means to at least meet costs, and means of exchange other than money may be used.

A TE does not have to emerge from a Transition Initiative, it is just the term we are using to help identify those enterprises that have the traits which align with Transition principles. If you have a better generic name than ‘Transition Enterpirse’ please let us know.

 

Characteristics of a Transition Enterprise

 

1. Resilience  outcome – TEs contribute to the increased resilience of communities in the face of, for example, economic uncertainty, energy and resource shortages and climate change impacts. As part of their community, TEs are also resilient in themselves, seeking to be financially sustainable and as independent as possible of external funding.

2. Appropriate resource use - TEs make efficient and appropriate use of natural resources (including energy), respecting finite limits and minimising and integrating waste streams. The use of fossil fuels in particular is minimised.

3. Appropriate localisation – TEs operate at a scale appropriate to the environment, economy and business sector with regard to sourcing, distribution and interaction with the wider economy.

4. More than profit – TEs exist to provide affordable, sustainable products and services and decent livelihoods rather than to generate profits for others. TEs can be profitable, but the use of their excess profits prioritises the community benefit rather than benefit to investors.

5. Part of the community - TEs work towards building a common wealth, owned and controlled as much as is practical by their workers, customers, users, tenants and communities. They have structures or business models which are as open, autonomous, equitable, democratic, inclusive and accountable as possible. They complement and work in harmony with other TEs.

 

Some thoughts

 

An enterprise could operate as any one of a number of different types of legal entity, and still meet most of these characteristics.

‘Regular’ social enterprises today serve society in some way, but often don’t address or respect environmental problems as well. They have a ‘social purpose’ which does not always meet a local community resilience-building purpose.

Unlike most private-for-profits and some social enterprises, the trading of TEs should itself contribute to the resilience or wellbeing of the local community (and do no harm elsewhere). For example, it can’t import plastic products from China to sell in a local shop to raise money to fund social projects.

We suggest that this is as far as we need to go with this definition at this stage. Perhaps we can better see these as a set of principles that new enterprises themselves help shape? It’s not yet clear what sort of economy we will see emerging over the next few years, or what types of enterprises will evolve out of Transition.

We will revise this definition as appropriate, apply it with caution and develop a means by which we can evaluate against it, as well as its usefulness overall.

The evolution of local economies that have even a small percentage of enterprises meeting these characteristics is a massive shift from our current globalised capitalist economic system. This list is quite possibly unrealistic to find in many enterprises from the outset, but this will become clearer over time.

 

Note: this is version 2 of this definition. It has been simplified and shortened the previous version. Thanks to Mark Simmonds of Hebden Bridge Transition Town for his help with this.


Credits : Image Source : Vegetable Garden by maya picture

 

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8 Comments

  1. Marcello
    June 25, 2012 at 10:54 am · Reply

    I would like to be a TRANSITION ENTERPRISE as well or at least to be involved in some project like that. please keep me update about your initiatives.

    • Admin (Shane Hughes) (Author)
      June 25, 2012 at 11:00 am · Reply

      Hi Marcello, your area of business looks interesting. Best way to keep in touch is by signing up to our facebook or twitter feeds on the right hand side of the page.

      I’d be interested to know what aspects of the Transition Enterprise definition above are most relevant to you… and likewise the areas that don’t fit now or perhaps never.

      Thanks
      Shane

  2. Chris Cook
    July 6, 2012 at 9:07 am · Reply

    Hi Shane

    I’m a member of Transition Linlithgow in Scotland and working on prototyping a new approach to community enterprise for resilient communities based upon assets in community ownership.

    This was where I had reached about a year ago

    http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisJCook/keith-community-partnership

    Since I joined UCL’s Institute for Security and Resilience Studies (ISRS) as Senior Research Fellow.

    http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isrs/about/fellows/ChrisCook

    I have been making great progress in developing tools eg ‘stock’

    https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/resilience/2012/01/09/a-stock-answer/

    which have been forgotten since before the banking system came along.

    This is a recent local presentation

    http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisJCook/linlithgow-heritage-in-transition

    I believe this approach to networked community enterprise and local credit creation and investment has great potential.

  3. Admin (Shane Hughes) (Author)
    July 6, 2012 at 10:48 am · Reply

    Hi Chris, great to see you on here… It’s Shane from European Creative Forum speaking (ECF) the mildly radical series of events that shadowed the Social Forum almost a decade ago. Also great to see that you’re active in Transition too.

    I had a quick look at the presentation and would love for you to write a simple, easy to understand, overview that we could post up here on the REconomy blog. If you have any other articles i would like to look at adding them to this blog too…. We”ve just got through the set up phase of this site and we’re now going through the embedding in the transition community phase and you’re contributions would be valued.

    • Chris Cook
      July 6, 2012 at 11:51 am · Reply

      Shane

      I remember you well, and that is why I commented. :-)

      My work on legal and financial structures is very much work-in-progress in respect of prototypes.

      In the last year or so I have come to make innovative use of the company limited by guarantee legal form (rather than the LLP, which, try as I might, I could not get to ‘scale’).

      Essentially the outcome is a ‘multi-stakeholder co-operative’ within a company limited by guarantee.

  4. Admin (Shane Hughes) (Author)
    July 6, 2012 at 1:51 pm · Reply

    rather than take over this thread, it would be great if you could email me here http://www.reconomyproject.org/?page_id=520 to see if we can’t get you to write a blog or two :)

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