The following chapter contains just under 40 separate ‘Voices’. We interviewed people about what social enterprise could or should do in the near distant future – working with the figure of approximately 20 years from now to help people focus their thinking. The interviewees were people who run social enterprises, who research and think about social enterprises, who make policy that affects social enterprises and who support and raise awareness of social enterprises.

From our previous experience and understanding of social enterprises, we knew that whatever else might come up in these discussions, the future visions we were asking for would be very different for each person. People's visions would depend on their personal definitions and their experiences. The interviewees were picked by us specifically for the breadth and range of their interests and experiences, to illuminate the range of thinking on doing business for a social purpose or in a social way, rather than to provide a representative or more generalisable mapping of views across the sector. This openness seemed to us essential when discussing something as unpredictable as the future. Our selection of interviewees was therefore made on the basis of diversity and was informed by our previous experience in the sector and by the advice of key informants from social enterprise support organisations. We also selected on the basis of people's long-term experience in the social enterprise sector, which is why people running very new social enterprises have not been included in our sample.

We decided not to conduct this research process in what might be considered a more traditional way, by collecting together all of the interview transcripts, systematically going through them to identify common themes and then presenting our discussion and conclusions using excerpts of text to illustrate them. Instead, we wanted each contribution to retain its distinctiveness and for the interviewees themselves to retain power over how their voices were used. This meant co-creating the texts with the interviewees to make sure they were happy with how their voices were being represented.

We did this in the following way:

• •by starting each interview with the same set of broad questions (see Appendix Two), but allowing the interviewees the freedom to explore particular points that interested them more than others and to answer in the context of their own organisations or in relation to a particular model of social enterprise;