The Voices that comprise the core of this book have offered us the chance to hear from people who run, support, research and create policy around social enterprises. Each piece has revealed what people involved in the social enterprise sector are passionate about, their values and how they believe the actions of their social enterprise will change society and the economy. Many of them bring years of experience to this discussion. As well as looking forward with hope and expectation, they have also been frank in highlighting difficulties and barriers – both for individual organisations and for social enterprises in general. They have informed us of new or emerging ideas and offered their particular solutions to pressing challenges along the way. Yet, even more crucially for the future of social enterprise, their contributions have provided further questions, challenged the status quo and highlighted divergent ways forward for the sector.

In this chapter we reflect on how the knowledge and experience that people have shared with us can assist in thinking about the future of social enterprise development. In the introduction to this book, our stated aim was to help people involved in social enterprises, or interested in them, to be clear about how their own goals, politics and life experience affect how they see social enterprises develop in the future. We hoped that greater clarity on these issues would help people to start up and develop appropriate and successful social enterprises (and, equally importantly, choose not to in particular contexts) and have fruitful debates about what is important in the management, governance and market positioning of those social enterprises.

The following interpretations are offered in this spirit – not of promoting any one specific future route for social enterprise definitions or practices, but instead offering clarity on how the different parts of the jigsaw that is the social enterprise movement may contribute to a variety of different agendas and address a range of problems in society. Each Voice in this book represents a single piece of the jigsaw that we have chosen to piece together around the core concept: ‘organisations trading in order to improve the well-being of people in the UK’.