EU border regions continue to face economic and social disadvantages compared to other regions in the same country. Since 1990, the European Commission has been implementing extensive territorial cooperation programs to support EU border regions in solving regional problems and building social cohesion. This study offers a contribution for decreasing the economic and social disadvantages of EU border regions by investigating the complementarity between institutional EU cross-border cooperation and social entrepreneurship. We argue that both concepts build upon similar drivers and characteristics with the aim of creating impact and bringing about change. We test and improve our initially literature-based framework to provide a better insight into how institutional and entrepreneurial processes could benefit from each other. We conduct interviews with experts operating at different governance levels and in various EU countries and border regions. The complementarity between both concepts is confirmed considering a differentiation between governance levels and fields of expertise. The results show that complementarity between the concepts mainly exists in terms of taking advantage of opportunities for a certain effect. The commercial activities of social enterprises are seen as effective, but it is necessary for social enterprises to establish sustainable EU cross-border cooperation and to improve regional social and economic development.

Little is known about how social enterprises and social start-ups compete with the bigger players on the market. It could be reasoned that social start-ups gain an advantage by the deployment of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) elements from the early beginning as a part of their core competences. The aim of this paper is to investigate if CSR elements can be a core competence and how they can contribute to the robustness of the business models of social start-ups. Data was gathered by conducting a case study and interviewing four social entrepreneurs in the first half of 2017. The data was analyzed with the help of a framework built upon the CSR pyramid, the business case for CSR and the Canvas business model. The main findings show that the CSR elements economic, ethical and discretionary responsibilities can be a core competence for social start-ups. Moreover, CSR elements can play an important role in the design of social business models. Especially the deployment of interrelationships between the CSR elements seems to be effective in designing a robust  business model of a social start-up.