A social enterprise is a business that is trading for a social or an environmental purpose, and is using the power of the market to deliver social or environmental outcomes.

You have to make a profit in any business. It is about what you do with your profit and whether your primary motive is for external shareholders or to use those profits to achieve social or environmental objectives.

The UK is quite far ahead of continental Europe in social enterprise. In other countries you get a partial approach, while we have a way of doing business that can achieve a variety of different objectives. We also have a coherent government framework for understanding social enterprise.

The Social Enterprise Coalition was set up six years ago to provide a strong voice and get social enterprise on the map. We educate, raise awareness, lobby and offer support to social enterprises. We bring together about 10,000 individual members that trade for social purposes.

What I am most proud of is getting cross-party support for social enterprise; convincing Tony Blair to buy into social enterprise and to then getting David Cameron and the Conservatives to adopt it within their policy framework.

It is a really an exhilarating feeling to get up on stage in front of a thousand people at our conference. It is the positive energy of the can-do people who are trying to make the world a better place. When you get that atmosphere you can almost bottle it and take it home with you.

People want to do good and do well at the same time. Customers and employees want more from life than simply a basic product or service. Now a range of major players, including companies such as Marks & Spencer, have had to move into the space once occupied by fair-trade pioneers.

What is exciting about social enterprise is the power that it gives ordinary people to have access to the benefits of the market and to make things better for themselves. Many large companies are having difficulty recruiting because graduates want more than just to be working for a large corporation.

The kind of passion and innovation that you get in many social enterprises can be a source of inspiration for people in private businesses and in the public sector. But the learning goes two ways. When we talk about private business or the public sector, there is huge variation and there are some hugely interesting things happening in all of it.

Part of what motivates me in my job is thinking about a world that is good for my children to live in. For that it is important we have sustainable businesses, businesses that are ethical and transparent.

There is room for a lot of leaders in the private sector—not just celebrities such as Jamie Oliver, but people who have made a huge amount of money and are successful—to help new social enterprises get set up through investment or being involved in awards or providing mentoring to social entrepreneurs.

The future looks positive for social enterprise. More people understand that it is an option. Social enterprise is set to play a bigger role on many fronts in the future. The challenge is making sure we have the business knowhow in place to maximise that and that we develop the finance and investment mechanisms further.