The project has three main objectives. The first is to develop research around three specific themes in Europe to create new content for entrepreneurship training programs, delivered internally or externally, within higher education institutions (HEIs) and widely disseminated to HEI management in Europe and beyond. The second objective is to promote transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations between HEIs and practitioners in the field around these themes, drawing on the Social X-Change network and the Impact Hub network of practitioners. The third is to capitalize on the network's momentum and the results obtained in the four thematic areas in order to influence practitioners at the European and national levels through the dissemination of Social X-Change outputs. The project aims to create new transnational collaborations and new research results on social entrepreneurship by working with practitioners (leaders of social enterprise support organizations, social entrepreneurs, investors, funders, policy makers) on the one hand, and with the academic community on the other.
Several academic studies have shown that research on social innovation and social entrepreneurship often remains inaccessible to practitioners. “The Role of Research in Social Innovation” (2014) highlights “the difficulty of translating research findings into concrete actions (...) cited by two-thirds of respondents as a major obstacle.” The priority identified by practitioners to overcome this obstacle was to create long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners rather than one-off interactions on specific projects: "Most create long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners rather than one-off interactions on specific projects. The Social X-Change Consortium wanted to respond to this need for research production, dissemination and popularization of these results, and collaboration between actors in the academic ecosystem (researchers, students, professors), practitioners, funders, and policy makers.