About MERSE
Where public efforts and private companies do not reach, local communities often place their hopes in initiatives from local social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur wants to do good, driven not to maximise profit but to contribute to development in their local community. The objective of MERSE was to make it easier to start and develop social enterprises in rural areas. Researchers studied how social entrepreneurship can be stimulated and developed in rural areas with a special focus on young people and women's opportunities to get involved as social entrepreneurs. With transnational cooperation between regions in the five countries: Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Ireland, the researchers were be able to exchange and compare country-specific knowledge and experiences on contextual social entrepreneurship. By conducting interactive sharing and co-creating place-based-best-practices, analyses similarities and differences, the project searched (and found) gaps that different unique models and examples could fill for each other and support transformative knowledge across borders.
About the project
