As highlighted in the “Scaling Impact Abroad: An Analysis for and framework of competences for Social Enterprise Internationalisation” published in July 2021, many social enterprises do not scale beyond their reach beyond local markets, often due to a lack of skills and competences for successful internationalization (Desa & Koch, 2014).
Despite of this need to support innovative social enterprises in expanding internationally, the vast majority of social entrepreneurs operate only on a local scale; A 2016 survey of social entrepreneurs in the global Impact Hub Network, showed that only 5.7% of early- stage social entrepreneurs declared having been actively internationalising their work in the previous year.
As part of the European Commission-funded “Enabling Social Entrepreneurs to Scale their Impact Internationally” (ESESII) project, under the framework of Erasmus+ KA2, Euclid Network developed an “Internationalisation Toolkit” that aims to enable social enterprise-support organizations to become catalysts for social enterprise internationalisation.
The toolkit was developed and reviewed by the ESESII consortium members: Materahub, Synthesis Center for Research and Education, the SEPT Competence Center at Leipzig University, Social Impact Award, Social Entrepreneurship Center at WU Vienna and Euclid Network.
The Toolkit is organised in line with the internationalisation process: first, the toolkit directs the reader to learn more about what is needed on the organisational level to successfully support social entrepreneurs to internationalise. Secondly, the toolkit offers several resources that help aspiring international social entrepreneurs identifying the most suitable destination for expanding its operations internationally. Lastly, the toolkit provides the reader with best practices of internationalisation support and provide actionable advice on how best to move forward.
This toolkit builds on the previous work carried out by the ESESII project consortium, including the innovative training curriculum.
