Social entrepreneurs address locally-rooted problems, providing innovative and sustainable solutions to today’s most pressing challenges such as social exclusion, poverty, food insecurity, waste management. Their business models, however, hardly ever include an international dimension despite the obvious chance to increase income and/or export a successful model by doing so. Since 2011’s Social Business Initiative, the European Commission and its expert group on social economy and social entrepreneurship have regularly reminded the importance of scaling-up proven social business solutions, including internationally, if we are to see a significantly more social and sustainable economic development. The key skills and competences social entrepreneurs need to embrace to effectively internationalise have little been explored. The main objectives of this project are to identify the skills and competences gap impeding social entrepreneurs to internationalise, diversify the European VET provision through the development of an innovative curriculum on social entrepreneurs’ internationalisation with a focus on individuals with fewer opportunities; build the skills and capacity of national social enterprises support organisations’ staff to guide their beneficiaries in their internationalisation strategy; and advise European and national policy-makers and interest groups on the necessary policy steps to enhance the capacity of social entrepreneurs’ to internationalise. To this end, the project will include following participants in their LTT activities: 24 Social Entrepreneurs with a particular focus on those lesser opportunities 12 Trainers from the partners’ organisations 10 staff from Social Enterprise Support Organisations The activities carried out by the project will include the development of a VET curriculum for social entrepreneurs and some pilot training workshops to test and iterate it; the development of an ‘up-skilling toolkit’ for social enterprise support organisations and a pilot training to test its use; the drafting and publication of actionable policy recommendations; a series of multiplier events to ensure dissemination of the project’s outputs. The project partners will use various methodologies in their implementation, from quantitative and qualitative surveying, to research results mapping, live testing and iteration, and crowdsourcing webinars. The project addresses identified skills and VET provision gaps innovatively and systematically through interventions at micro, meso and macro levels. The project will result, on the medium-term, in a significantly higher number of social entrepreneurs trading cross-border, investing abroad, partnering with their peers in other European countries and exporting their model and solutions. In the long-term, this would lead to greater social impact of current social enterprises, an increase of the sector’s contribution to the European economy, and an enhancement of the social impact and VET ecosystems through partnerships and mutual-recognition. The desired impact of the project at European, national and local level, draws upon the systemic change approach. By tackling the key questions of skilling social entrepreneurs and their support structures, a larger number of social impact ecosystem actors will be able to scale-up nationally and grow their impact. This, in turn, will result in a fairer and more inclusive labour market, more sustainable business practices and spilling-out of social impact values and trends towards the mainstream business sector, and the economy at large.
- Identify the type of competences that SEs and social enterprise support organisations (SESOs) require in order to support the scaling of SE’s impact internationally; - Create instruments that can be used by SESOs for supporting their beneficiaries in their efforts to expand internationally; - Capacity building for national SESOs, focusing on skills for supporting their beneficiaries in their internationalisation strategy; - Facilitate cooperation among vocational education and training providers and SESOs across Europe, particularly with regards to supporting cross-border efforts of SEs; - Raise awareness about internationalisation in the social enterprise sector among European policy makers and provide relevant inputs on innovative ways to support it. - Address a skills gap innovatively and systematically through interventions at micro, meso and macro levels.
ESESII (“Enabling Social Entrepreneurs to Scale their Impact Internationally”), was initiated to understand better the needs of social entrepreneurs (SEs) who want to internationalise, and to develop adequate support: For the SEs themselves and the competences they require, their support structures, as well as provide tools to support a more enabling ecosystem. The ESESII consortium partners designed various activities to address the main barriers that were identified, SEs face with regards to scaling up internationally. They include amongst others: - Lack of awareness of the possibility of internationalising (social entrepreneurs are often unaware of the impact their business/knowhow could have in a different location) - Lack of soft skills such as tolerance to ambiguity or intercultural management - Little specialised knowhow and skills (e.g. finding appropriate scaling models, ability to manage international teams, knowledge about market/system in target countries, fundraising) - Absence or relatively young local ecosystems to support social entrepreneurs in their scale-up; The project addressed these needs by creating a series of intellectual outputs, training activities and dissemination events detailed below.