Benchmarking digital education programs on social entrepreneurship: what a digital program on social entrepreneurship can learn from other digital social entrepreneurship programs

Social entrepreneurship education is becoming a must-have for academic institutions. However, there is little agreement on how to consider dimensions like international scope, interdisciplinary participation and educational format. This paper illustrates how benchmarking can support the product creation and improvement process of such an educational program offered in a digital format. Social Entrepreneurship for Local Change (SELC) is a European Union funded Erasmus+ consortium, which developed a digital social entrepreneurship course. The program's goal was to serve basic educational objectives of its students and teachers as well as strategic goals of the universities and the European Commission. Benchmarking, which has evolved to benchlearning, is a strategic management tool that measures the practices of one organization against the best practices of leading organizations in the same area. In this paper, the practices of SELC's digital program were benchmarked against two more mature digital social entrepreneurship programs using qualitative methods and resulting in a comparative scorecard. By recognizing and addressing quality gaps revealed by the benchmarking process, SELC's administrators can improve their own quality and put the program in the best position to achieve its goals.