Social Enterprise Programs: ‘Like Little Warts On A Business School’

You’ve been involved in the social entrepreneurship space for several decades. What are some key trends you’ve noticed in the past five years? 

Leading corporations and businesses are focused on how to get the best and brightest students to come to them. But they’re finding that students don’t always want to go to the top investment bank. Students are basically turning around and interviewing the companies in terms of what they’re doing. Companies are beginning to come around to this. It’s not a massive sea change, but there’s a slow change happening.

Have you heard about the B Corporation status? It’s a community of for-profit businesses that changed their rules of incorporation, so their shareholders would realize that they are going to hold social and environmental standards as high as financial outcomes. There are 1,000 B Corps today, and it’s becoming a worldwide movement. It shows that businesses want to focus on much more than just finance.

After all, how much money do you really need to make? That’s the thing. This idea of making millions and millions — students are changing in terms of what they value. They’re not willing to compromise some things. They realize if their entire focus is on making money, and making money is wonderful, but if it’s the only thing that drives you, you’re going to have a very sad life.

How do you answer critics who contend that business interests and social interests are rarely compatible? 

I certainly see why people put finance first, but that’s not to say that you then go out and treat your workers like crap and pollute the environment. You can be finance first and still be responsible in terms of your business. They don’t even have to be equal.

But businesses do have to be mindful of their impact today, otherwise they will no longer be seen as legitimate in society. It behooves them to think about how they treat their workers and deal with their supply chain. Those things actually have a big impact on the financial bottom line of a company. Making money is great, but you have to be conscious of the conditions around how you’re making money.

What drew you to social entrepreneurship? 

II was born and raised in Latin American. When you grow up in situations where tremendous inequality is very visible, and you see the drive and the desire for opportunity of people less fortunate than you, it’s a very personal thing. You really want to create those opportunities, so my entire life has been geared towards that.

As for entrepreneurship, it’s not like you ever become an entrepreneur. You just get better and better at identifying opportunities and better at handling failures and setbacks.

What characteristics do you notice among social entrepreneurs specifically? 

For commercial entrepreneurs, their mindset is in getting it up, getting it going, being successful, and exiting (and I’m generalizing here). Social entrepreneurs have a very hard time exiting. They’re usually so committed to the issue that you will find when they exit, they don’t really exit. What I mean is, they go and form another venture that’s doing something similar.

All of the entrepreneurs I know with a strong social mission have started out with one organization and then realize, “I can’t do this with a nonprofit, so I’ll spin off a for-profit that will allow me to do X or Y,” but it’s always along the same trajectory. They are committed to the issue, whether it’s health or education or whatever. I don’t see that as much on the commercial side — those entrepreneurs are much more prone to exit. There are exceptions, but that’s a general rule.

Are there any things that concern you about social entrepreneurship? 

There are so many organizations working toward the same mission, but you never see mergers in this space, which is a real disadvantage. This is especially true for nonprofits. There’s something very disturbing about the inability of social entrepreneurs to understand that it’s the issue they’re tackling, rather than the challenge of growing their organization really big.

Social change never happened because one enterprise grew as big as Coco-Cola. It happened because several organizations got together and really insisted on changing the system. If you look at the civil rights movement or the women’s rights movement, one organization didn’t get really huge, so seeking those partnerships and mergers is really the only way we’re going to be able to effect social change.

Could you tell me a bit more about the center? 

The center is more than 10 years old, and I’ve been here for five. The mission of the Said Business School is actually to tackle global challenges, and so social entrepreneurship is at the core. Most of our students would say they came to Said Business School at least in part because of the Skoll Centre.

The ideals of social entrepreneurship permeate our faculty and courses — whether it’s in building a business, social finance, or the shared economy — it really is right there in every single course.

That’s a real exception. Most of the time, the social enterprise program is like a little wart on the school. It’s a little bit like gender — oh yeah, there’s the one woman who teaches gender — but it’s not a part of the mainstream. That’s very different at Said.

How many students are involved with the Skoll Centre? 

That’s a really tough one. We have some 260 MBA students, and I would say 200 are completely involved with what we do. The other 60 are tangentially involved because they can’t help it in terms of courses and activities. We have a mandatory course called the Entrepreneurial Project. There are six tutors on that course, and the social entrepreneurship project is the biggest because that’s where the interest is.

We also have a big open space called the Lanchpad, where students from across Oxford come together to work in teams, share their ideas, and get their ventures going. There must be another 1,000 students from across the university that come through in a week’s time. This space has just been going on for a year, and we’re already seeing a mushrooming of activity.

We also have the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship coming up on April 15-17, which is like the Davos of social entrepreneurship. We do this in conjunction with the Skoll Foundation, and it brings some 1,000 participants from all over the world who are in social entrepreneurship themselves or part of the supportive ecosystem, such as impact investors or philanthropists or policy makers. That’s a big, huge deal.