Where established actors from the market, state, and civil society reach their limits, social enterprises succeed by addressing social and ecological problems in often unconventional and innovative ways. While the term "social entrepreneur" is already well-established in the UK and the USA, the concept of the social entrepreneur has only recently come into the public eye in Germany and has so far remained more of a media phenomenon than a subject of empirical and theoretical research. In 2010, the research network Innovatives Soziales Handeln - Social Entrepreneurship was founded with the support of the Mercator Foundation to create the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and comparative assessment of social enterprises in Germany and to generate initial recommendations for action for entrepreneurs, financiers, policymakers, and the higher education system.