Organizations in the field of social innovation management are characterized by dilemmas and contradictions. Business models (BM) that develop within the contexts of these organizations are specific: they result from compromises sometimes difficult to sustain. For some of these organizations, the business model on which they are built is symptomatic of paradoxical situations. For some social innovation based businesses, we hypothesize that the evolution of the BM is partly the result of paradoxes and conflicts between social utility values and economic performance requirements, which the entrepreneur has to face. We use the concept of ethical stress and the concept of organizational paradox for the analysis of a case: the trajectory of the BM of a company, which did not lay within the social innovation field at first. Faced with certain tensions between the nature of its activity, the entrepreneur’s values and the initial BM, the company gradually moved toward the social innovation field to become a social enterprise as defined below. We highlight the trajectory of the BM and we propose a way to explain it that is based on the highlighting of paradoxical situations that caused various disruptions. Essentially, these paradoxes arise from differences between the values upheld by the entrepreneur and changes imposed by the company's requirements for economic survival.
