Saving the World

Posted by: Kerry Capell on March 28

On March 27, I headed to Oxford University’s Said Business School for the fifth Skoll World Forum. The Skoll Foundation, was set up by eBay founder Jeff Skoll in 1999 to promote social entrepreneurship. And four years later, Skoll crossed the Atlantic with the establishment of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford.

It’s a sort of Davos for social entrepreneurs, attended by more than 700 people from around the world. So what’s a social entrepreneur? According to Skoll, unlike the traditional entrepreneur who “sees value in the creation of new markets, the social entrepreneur aims for value in the form of transformaitonal change that will benefit disadvantaged communities and ultimately society at large.”

Their stories were incredibly inspiring. I chatted with Dr. Mitchell Besser, one of the winners of the Skoll Foundation Awards this year. Besser and his friend, Gene Falk, a media exec and AIDS activist, ditched lucrative jobs in the U.S. to form mothers2mothers. This grass roots program in Africa trains and employs new mothers with HIV to provide education and support to their peers, giving them access to life saving treatment for their babies and themselves.

In the conferences' packed sessions, audience members heard more stories such as Besser and Falk's, debated the best ways to partner with big business, and heard about various tools to measure the impact assessment of such ventures. Out in the halls and the swish new courtyard of Said, fresh out of B-school entrepreneurs schmoozed with seasoned veterans such as venture capitalist Alan Patricof (now board member of the Millenium Challenge Corp. and MD of Greycroft, a VC firm in the digital media space and Bill Drayton, chairman & CEO of Ashoka. Jimmy Carter and Al Gore were also present.

Big business was represented, too. I sat down with Tim Brown, CEO of leading design firm IDEO, which is increasingly active in this space. He is a big believer that design thinking and its approach to problem solving has a serious contribution to make in this area. "After all, design is about converting need into demand," he says.

Behind the scenes much of the talk in the halls came from wannabe entrepreneurs, inspired by what they heard, who wanted to figure out a way to ditch the day job to start a new career. And after hearing countless inspiraitonal and powerful stories, it's easy to understand why.