....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.

Perhaps my reason for doing so is best summarized in an email I received from Tim Smit, one of the UK’s leading social entrepreneurs, creator of the Eden Project, among other ventures. 

“….At other times I would have said you were mad, but everything I am reading and hearing is telling me that 2009-2025 has the potential to be this Millennium's "Dark Ages". One of the major tools at our disposal to deal with it and end up on the sunny uplands (so to speak) is to create a new vision for business which takes the best of entrepreneurial spirit, but melds it to the benefit of a wider group than simple shareholders. So...power to your elbow and much love.” 

Precisely.  I suppose I first started to realize the potential of business school platforms to shape new markets when Rick Aubry, another social entrepreneur heading up Rubicon Programs in the San Francisco Bay area, invited me to the class he teaches at Stanford School of Business.  That was five years ago.  I was amazed at the level of interest in social enterprise on the part of business school students from one of the world’s leading universities.  But, I cautioned myself, I had to remember Stanford was an anomaly, plucked down in the heart of Silicon Valley in the middle of a rarified world.   

Yet over the last few years, my exposure widened as I came into contact with business school students at Harvard, Yale, Fuqua at Duke, INSEAD, London School of Economics, London Business School, IESE in Barcelona, Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, the University of Geneva and even the National University of Singapore – all enthusiastic, motivated and avidly searching for ways to apply their business skills and talents to changing the world – particularly through markets.
 
So why the Skoll Centre?  My number one reason is the students at Said in particular, and across the Oxford campus in general.  But there are other important reasons, as follows:

• Most of the academic activity including the research and case studies that have been conducted to date on social entrepreneurship is focused on the US and comes out of US academia.  But the Skoll Centre is in Europe, providing an unprecedented opportunity to position it as the premier academic hub for social entrepreneurship in this region and beyond at a time when Europe and other nations around the world are seeking to stimulate social entrepreneurship among their own citizens.
  
• Oxford is a community of stellar colleges focused on just about every discipline that has ever been developed and pursued.  Just starting with Said’s many research centers, there is a wealth of possibilities to undertake cross cutting research and learning on how social entrepreneurship can advance and be enhanced by those numerous fields.
  
• The Skoll Center is in a unique position to convene researchers and practitioners – not just once a year at the Skoll World Forum, a now renowned event convening close to a thousand people - but year-long, so that the research that is undertaken has relevance to the wider community of practice, is nurtured by them and is relevant to those who want to pursue social entrepreneurial ventures from different disciplines.
  
• No one university can hope to generate and sustain transformational change on its own.  To do so require links with other top universities around the world where business schools are increasingly seeking to spearhead research and teaching in social entrepreneurship. Together, we can build a global research agenda that complements and reinforces a growing movement to create markets that are consistent with our values and aspirations.

To sum up, over the last few weeks I have spoken to a number of journalists writing for US based publications.  The focus has been the current economic situation.  One of them asked me, “But if we do change the way our markets work so that we focus on combining profits and principles, won’t it have significant negative implications for the incredible global economic growth we have experienced in the last few decades?” 

To which I countered:  have you had a look at who is benefiting from that “incredible economic growth”?  The current gap in wealth – taking all assets into account, including home ownership, stocks, bonds and pension plans – is actually far greater and increasing more rapidly than the much highlighted gap in income.  The wealthiest 2% of adults own more than 50% of global wealth while the bottom 50% barely own 1%.  Over the course of the 1990s in the USA alone, the top 1% saw their average wealth increase by 63%. In contrast, the average wealth of the poorest 40% actually declined by 44%. The enormous gap in assets has contributed to the gap in home ownership and to the US vulnerability to the current global crisis which unfolds.

So what kind of a world do we want today and tomorrow?  I am at the Skoll Centre at Oxford’s Saïd Business School because I know what kind of world I want for my children and their children’s children.