Who is your client?
3/11/2010
Last week, I gave a speech to over 500 students at Cambridge University. I was there to speak on how we can radically re-think business models for sustainability in the 21st century. We had a great debate, and I challenged the audience to think about the triggers needed to transform markets so that they are responsive to people, planet, and profit.
I believe the answer lies with remembering your "client". Read more
Entrepreneurs: balancing value appropriation with value creation
26/1/2010
There's been a lot of talk recently around the halls of Saïd about the future of business and what role entrepreneurs - especially those with a social bottom line - will play. Along the way, some interesting questions have arisen. In particular, where do we draw the line between commericial and social entrepreneurs - especially if both are having a social "impact"? So here's my two cents.
Entrepreneurs, whether primarily commercial or “social” in orientation, are cut from the same cloth. In that sense, the term “social entrepreneur” has done entrepreneurs-so-designated a disservice, as people tend to classify them alongside “charities” and “do-gooders”. So it seems appropriate to highlight the essence of entrepreneurial activity in general, and then distinguish those who are primarily driven by value appropriation and from those primarily driven by social value creation, keeping in mind that all entrepreneurs must do both – but in each case, the emphasis is different.
In any situation, business-as-usual -or the status quo- implies the existence of an equilibrium which, even if unsatisfactory and inefficient, is at that time the only option that exists. Thus people simply put up with the current shortcomings. The entrepreneur focuses on addressing that dissatisfactory equilibrium by providing an innovative solution – be it a new product, service or process.
For example, commercial entrepreneurs Sergey Brin and Larry Page identified an unsatisfactory equilibrium in the slowness of existing search engines. So they exploited the opportunity by improving on search engine speed, among other things, and in so doing created Google, raising the bar for all search engines. Likewise, social entrepreneur Jimmy Wales sought to provide a free open-content encyclopedia and today Wikipedia is available in the world’s leading ten languages.
Thus, all entrepreneurs are driven by a perceived opportunity which they relentlessly pursue. Neither is propelled primarily by money. But for the commercial entrepreneur, from the beginning of the venture, the perceived opportunity lies in creating a new or improved product or service with the expectation that it will sell, generating financial profits for the entrepreneur and the investors. As such, profit is essential to achieve massive uptake and market mainstreaming.
Social entrepreneurs, however, are driven to address market and/or government failures. They work where business have failed to come up with innovative ways to design and deliver the goods and services needed to address social, economic and environmental challenges because the risks are too high in relation to the financial profits. Similarly, these are issues governments have been unable or unwilling to tackle – because of financial, political or bureaucratic constraints. Social entrepreneurs are drawn to deal with such challenges, transforming the systems and practices that have stood in the way of pragmatic, equitable and sustainable solutions.
Our hope at the Skoll Centre– and the reason for our presence in Said Business School - is that all entrepreneurs balance value appropriation and social value creation goals from the outset as they pursue their innovative approaches. And it is that spirit that we are keen to interface with the business leaders of tomorrow, including "social" and commercial entrepreneurs, and their investors.
What are you throughts? Ping us on Twitter @skollcentre
Want to read more? Check out Filipe Santos' latest research on this topic.
Perfectly Unreasonable Endeavors
No one said changing the world would be easy. Although that hasn’t stopped a unique breed of social entrepreneurs from confronting challenges many of us would hesitate to tackle.
Read the latest piece that John Elkington and I wrote for the Ritz Carlton Magazine. We highlight some intractable problems, and the unreasonable people who are tackling them with some rather outlandish goals.
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download the full article
Director's Welcome
When I joined the Skoll Centre in January of 2009, a future colleague looked me in the eye inquisitively and asked, “Why did you agree to take this job, Pamela?” I paused, rather startled by the question – and the undertone that somehow, I had to be slightly daft to become the next Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School.
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An Initiation to Join Us
Want to know what we’re all about? Learn more about how you can get involved with the Skoll Centre.
Here's an introductory video to explain what we do.
Imagining Sustainable Solutions
Date: 14 July 2009
I am an unlikely choice to judge the final round of an event that touts itself as the "world's premier student technology competition". Ask any of my tech-savvy and much younger co-workers - and when they stop laughing at the thought -they will undoubtedly and forcefully concur that I am technology-challenged. But there I was, one of five judges that came together in Cairo at the beginning of July for Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2009 Worldwide Finals. Read more at Nextbillion.net
The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets the Change the World
Read more about my recent book with John Elkington. We run with a quote from playwright George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Using that thesis, we argue that the best place to find tomorrow's revolutionary business models is on the unpredictable fringes of the mainstream market.