Students at Saïd Business School have always been very active in reaching out to the community, locally and globally. The Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation supports a number of community engagement programmes that facilitate students’ involvement with entrepreneurship education activities in the wider community.
There are various ways how students can become involved:
Oxford Business X (OBX) is a recently formed charity that helps secondary schools in Oxfordshire to develop practical business awareness amongst their students. It does this by giving the pupils the opportunity, support - financial or otherwise - necessary, to set up and run a business enterprise for themselves. Students are involved as mentors, working in pairs for each student team that enters the OBX competition. They mentor them in the process of preparing and submitting business proposals to a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style judging panel of local business leaders to compete for seed money and in-kind incubation services.
Saïd Global Entrepreneur Challenge (SGEC) is a global competition for young entrepreneurs, aged 16-25. SGEC empowers young people to think critically about how they can make the world a better place, and then provides them with the opportunity and tools to bring about change. Six annual competitions have successfully been managed by the voluntary efforts of successive Saïd Business School MBA Classes. To date, SGEC has inspired over 200 teams of youth entrepreneurs from six continents and leveraged the skills of over 100 MBA students as mentors from similarly diverse backgrounds.
Oxford Volunteer Consultants (OVC) was started by MBA students in 2007. It provides a platform for teams of SBS students and alumni willing to provide pro bono consulting services to local and international social enterprises. In doing so, it aspires to create lasting social impact on the wider community, and to foster an appreciation for and provide practical consulting experience to SBS students. To date, OVC has helped more than a dozen clients. Past projects ranged from questions related to strategy and financial management to marketing, industry analysis, and operations. OVC is keen to continue giving back to the community and looks forward to helping even more groups, big and small.