The subject of study in this master's thesis is social or socially responsible entrepreneurship in rural areas, especially in Slovenia. To find social enterprises in rural areas, we first had to make a boundary between rural and non-rural space, which we achieved by making a simple division of rural space. Among the multitude of business entities registered or operating in the rural area, we looked for those companies that, in addition to their profits, also consciously invest in the growth of social values. We found many of them in the official records of Slovenian social enterprises. However, there are also quite a few of them that do not have this type of status. Their presence and, above all, their operation is, therefore, more difficult to detect.
Social entrepreneurship and the social economy have been present in the Slovenian countryside since the end of the 18th century when cooperatives began to develop. Today, they appear in various legal organizational forms and activities which still have a lot of room for further development. One of the possibilities is indicated in this master's thesis and involves a design thinking method that complements the geographical view of space and its cause-and-effect connections between the elements. We prepared a simple business model for the establishment of an ecoregion in the area of LAG Barje with the hinterland.
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