Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship

Mark Hand, one of our Skoll Skollars, takes us on a recap of the Skoll World Forum. As Mark says, “happy reading”!

If you missed this year’s Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, never fear: a raft of students from across Oxford worked all week long to get you the inside scoop on the conversations going on in the high-level hallways of Said Business School. The write-ups of our student correspondents provide a pretty comprehensive–and quite encouraging–window into the world of social entrepreneurship.

The theme of this year’s forum, disruption, surfaced in a number of posts. I look at four skills necessary for shifting systems; MBA Meagan Johnson takes it up a notch to the power of system design itself. Rwanda, Sara Leedom argued, has practical lessons to teach us on such system-level change—unfortunately, the session she visited missed the boat. At the same time, Environmental Anthropology PhD Shauna Monkman points out one critical flaw in using Rwanda a model of disruptive change. DPhil Guillermo Cassanovas provides notes from a session with industry leaders well on their way to effecting large-scale change; MBA Michael Thornton examines how large companies can do this in a way that is more than “staving off Mr. Freeze with a Bic Lighter.”

There were a few well-trodden topics: James Tilbury covers the birth of yet the latest, greatest impact measurement tool put forward by the founder of now-bankrupt Monitor Group; and MBA Nicki Ashcroft offers a quirky comparison between impact measurement and one of your favorite children’s cartoons. MBAs Akiko Aiba and Nat Ware explore the relationship between social enterprise, aid, and philanthropy.

The mobile phone effect got a lot of play at this year’s Forum. That’s not too surprising, MBA Charlton Mak points out, given that mobile phones are more prevalent globally than toilets. MBA Sabre Collier says she is still looking for a business model that might be appropriate to Angola, dear to her heart; fellow Skoll Scholar Shubham Anand may have uncovered ideas in both monitoring and payments, while DPhil Ali Aslan Gümüsay asks how innovations like these can be taken to scale.

One of the biggest open questions at the 2013 Skoll World Forum was the question of youth unemployment–a hot topic beyond Said Business School. Both MBA Chad Anderson and MPhil Sherihan Abd El Rahman report out on the “ticking time bomb” of youth unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa. What can investors do? MBAs Chris Hunter and Greg Coussa might have some answers: Chris discusses one approach to startup generation with which we’re experimenting here at Said Business School, and Greg highlights the work one organization is doing to support small- and medium-sized enterprises around the world.

But what, exactly, does it take to get this hard work done? One surprising topic from the week was the importance of emotional connection. In her second article, Shauna Monkman wonders if the ability to connect is behind one of social entrepreneurship’s greatest successes; MPP Ken Moriyama suggests its power as a check on the worst demons of do-gooders.

Finally, if all this is still a muddle to you, I posted a Social Entrepreneurship 101 designed for beginners and a first stab at identifying key conversations happening at the Forum. Happy reading!

Continuing our series of posts by our University of Oxford students attending the Skoll World Forum, this piece is by Michael Thornton, a current Skoll Scholar and MBA student at Said Business School, University of Oxford.

When it comes to sustainability, one of the things that has always nagged me about companies that “go green” is that it typically just means recycling things around the office, some minor carpooling and installing or purchasing renewable energy.  There is nothing wrong with these efforts, but it’s a bit like the Human Torch staving off Mr. Freeze with a Bic Lighter.  Sure it’s the right direction and maybe even setting a good example others will follow, but it’s a serious, nearly negligent under-utilization of power.

The vast bulk of most companies’ environmental and social impact comes well before they decide how to power the lights in their offices.  The majority of a product’s impact is often in the sourcing and manufacture of its material components.  In others, like automobiles, the impact is in how the product is used (ie burning fuels for 10 years).  Rarely, therefore, is the majority of a company’s impact in the scope of a typical greening agenda.

Sustainable sourcing is a major step forward and was the subject of the session Sustainable Sourcing: The Business Imperative.  Moderator Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto led an interesting discussion on the topic and seeded the most interesting and actionable insight in the process.   Together with the panelists, William Rosenzweig, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Physic Ventures, Mary Jo Cook, Chief Impact Officer of FairTrade USA and Jason Clay, Senior Vice President, Markets of World Wildlife Fund US, the Dean Martin explored audience selected topics.  The process started with a macro conditions exploration including these gems paraphrased from Jason Clay –

The foreboding:   In the next forty years we have to produce as much food and fiber as in the last 8000

The more hopeful (room to improve):  the bottom 25% of producers create 50% of the impact and only 10% of the products

The most interesting portion of the discussion was that on the barriers to adoption of truly sustainable sourcing, playing off some highly relevant audience members.  It became clear that there are indeed political barriers in convincing CEO’s and investors that sustainable sourcing can be good or at worst neutral to the bottom line and communication challenges in bringing that message down through organizations to the purchasers who ultimately select products.  But, an undercurrent that had been popping up throughout the discussion became acutely apparent.  There is a very real practical challenge in enacting a sustainable sourcing policy.  Supply chains are so complex and often opaque that it is incredibly challenging to actually determine how much carbon or water may be required to produce a product or whether all components meet humanitarian or labor standards.

The need, as Dean Martin highlighted, is for a comprehensive toolset to allow all actors in the value chain to enact sustainability goals.  He advocated an assemblage of foundations and non-profits working in related areas to come together around this issue as one that can transform so many others.  I believe he is right that all too often those seeking change will look to closely at their particular issue’s direct on the ground impact, and miss the root causes or potential solutions that could exist.  He further advocated that this assemblage work to create a tool map of sorts which can be disseminated and then broken off by anyone who can fill the puzzle.

This got me excited and thinking:  This could be a real step towards real change.  But, what would such a toolset include?  My own first pass would be:

-        Open supply chain mapping data & software

-        Common ranking and metrics for impacts – positive and negative

-        “Additive Impact Analysis” – my name for the ability to take the impact of a component product and add it to the whole, all the way through the value chain

-        Choice software that allows a purchaser to quickly see the impacts and balance them against cost and more common factors quickly and clearly

-        Better business methodologies for measuring supply chain risk as it relates to environmental and other “soft” factors

-        A mechanism for supply chain insurance that does not require creation of a duplicate supply chain but instead makes existing ones more distributed, sustainable and secure

-        Public indexes for key environmental data from suppliers around the world.  This can help bring aid and attention to the worst and plaudits for the best

-        A more comprehensive consumer facing labeling system – there are too many to the point where impact is being lost

-        Metrification of environmental and social impacts

It’s imperative that those who have super-hero leverage over the levers of the global sourcing system activate them.  The top 1000 companies control 33% of the global economy; if they act, the world changes.  What tools do you think are missing to convince even a less forward leaning company that they can source sustainably?

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This is a guest post by Michael Thornton, a current Skoll Scholar and MBA student at Said Business School, University of Oxford.

Continuing our series of posts by our University of Oxford students attending the Skoll World Forum, this piece is by Christopher Hunter, an MBA student at the University of Oxford. 

A question that one can expect to hear frequently debated around business schools and in fora such as Skoll, is that of whether entrepreneurship can be taught. Some people believe that it is something innate that you can’t really learn, while others argue that such a view is nonsensical: basically a nature versus nurture argument. What is clearer, however, is that there is a new generation of thinking behind how to run start-ups, led by the nascent Lean LaunchPad movement, that says whoever you are, you need to treat a new company completely differently from an established one.

The LLP was pioneered by American serial entrepreneur, Steve Blank, and is now taught at a number of leading universities. It has blossomed outwards from its roots in the Bay area at Berkeley and Stanford across the USA, and this coming term, it will be launched at Said Business School at Oxford. At its core, the LLP is a business model development programme that encourages people working on new products and services to ‘get out of the building’ to speak to customers before going to market. 90% of new ventures fail, often in their first year, and that, says Steve Blank, can be because there wasn’t ever a customer to begin with.

Jim Hornthal, partner of Hornthal Investment Partners, and an instructor for LLP, led a workshop about the course at the Skoll World Forum, where he built on this point. According to Jim, many business founders rue their decision to ‘scale prematurely’ but what they are missing is that they didn’t get big too quickly, it was that they got big at all; by going through a process of customer discovery and development, it often shows that there isn’t a market for a product, even if in the head of its creator, he is onto a winner.

If it turns out that there isn’t actually anyone interested in your original idea, the LLP doesn’t say that is the end of the road: it tells you to pivot. Pivots come in all shapes and sizes and can amount to a small variation from the starting point to a radical shift into a completely new area. The LLP team is replete with examples, and Jim, in his characteristically entertaining style, told us a few of them. One such was the story of Autonomow, the automated lawnmower that was deemed too dangerous and expensive but evolved into Blue River Technologies, an organic weed-killing company with VC backing.

Of course, in order to make these pivots, entrepreneurs have to be not too wedded to their ideas. For this reason, Jim recommends looking for teams that are “resilient,” that is, willing to accept criticism and potentially move away from a project in which they have invested time and emotional energy. As one might expect, he also likes groups with domain expertise and complementary skillsets, requiring a balanced team with at least 3 members. Once in, people are expected to commit fully with lots of work expected between classes. They are, after all, trying to build companies and even if that doesn’t take a certain kind of person, it takes a certain level of commitment.

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This is a guest post by Christopher Hunter, an MBA student at the University of Oxford. 

Continuing our series of posts by our University of Oxford students attending the Skoll World Forum, this piece is by Sherihan Abd El Rahman, a graduate student at the University of Oxford.

On December 17, 2010, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the lack of employment for college graduates such as himself. The event became the tipping point for multiple revolutions across different countries in the Middle East, largely led by youth. The region had long witnessed a period of youth unemployment, a depressing fact with exponential consequences considering that youth in the Middle East make up a large proportion of their respective populations.

The euphoric sense of revolutions, however, was short lived, for things did not miraculously get better overnight with a change in leadership. To this day, the Middle East has one of the highest youth joblessness rates in the world, a major social and political challenge.

I sat on a panel discussion of two leading Arab businessmen, a social entrepreneur and president of a youth unemployment organization, to discuss the salient issue of unemployed youth in the Middle East.

On the panel was Dr. Ossama Hassanein, an Egyptian American who has managed over $1billion of international technology funds and currently serves as the Chairman of the Board for Techwadi. Dr. Ossama was hopeful about the ability of the region to create jobs for the future – in the past three years alone, fifty six new companies have been financed by very effective incubators, with mentors and angel investors providing an incredible engine of growth. According to Dr. Ossama, “everyone is trying to find a way whereby they can participate with the transformation of innovation into value systems.” That alone, should provide reason for hope.

Similarly, Fadi Ghandour, founder and CEO of Aramex recognized the importance of the private sector in creating fundamental and systemic changes to solve the problem of youth unemployment. In fact, the private sector, he says, must bypass government initiatives and begin to take things into their own hands. Government efforts to reform the education system and create more “employable” graduates lags far behind the urgent need to develop the skills required for work by the private sector. It is the responsibility of private companies to therefore establish initiatives to make sure graduates have the necessary skills upon entering the workforce.

Panelist Reham Di’bas’s experiences exemplify the challenges of graduating from college with barely any employable skills. Graduating with a BA in Computer Science, she didn’t know how to write a CV or prepare for an interview. It was only when she participated in a program by the non-profit organization Education for Employment (EFE) that she learned what it takes to be ready for the workforce. After interning with a job that was not willing to pay her a salary, she became involved with a rising community of social entrepreneurs and started her own social entreprise – a website called EZSakan to help college students around Birzeit Univesity find housing.

President and CEO of EFE, Jamie Mcauliffe, who was also on the panel, underscored the lack of communication amongst the various sectors – universities and schools do not communicate with various industries to figure out how to reform the curriculum and bring about new, relevant courses. This is EFE’s mission: bridging the gap between graduating from school and going to work. But without business “leaning in” and participating in the transition, the system will remain broken.

Despite the depressing figures, there have been a few successes where sector partnerships took off. Jordan’s University of Science and Technology made a decision ten years ago to teach professionally relevant IT courses – as a result, almost all graduates have a job waiting for them upon graduation. According to Ghandour, there is a direct link between this and the fact that the majority of employees in the back offices of tech companies all across the Gulf are Jordanian. Similarly, a partnership and business deal struck between Dr. Usama Fayyad and King Abdallah led to the establishment of Oasis500 – the MENA region’s first seed investment firm that supports social entrepreneurs develop their ideas giving both financial support and mentorship.

At the end of the day, everyone agrees that youth unemployment in the Middle East is a ticking time bomb that requires serious investment from both the private and public sector. The question is, how fast can the various sectors act before these youth become known in the history books as the Middle East’s lost generation?

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This is a guest post by Sherihan Abd El Rahman, a graduate student at the University of Oxford.

Continuing our series of posts by our University of Oxford students attending the Skoll World Forum, this piece is by Charlton Mak, an MBA student at the University of Oxford.

In the Mo(bile)mentum session at the Skoll World Forum, Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS reminded us that “there are more mobile phones than toilets” in our world today, and the panel represented industry association (GSMA), governmental agency (USAID) and the private sector (Praekelt Foundation). The discussions revolved around the challenges each sector faced in accelerating the adoption of mobile for development and how to aggregate the efforts of the different sectors. The session made me imagine what it would be like if a collaborative ecosystem could be developed in China, which has over 1 billion mobile phones in operation today.

Having previously worked in both the charity and commercial space in Hong Kong and China, it made me reflect on mobile’s role in developmental work in China and how it can truly become an empowerment tool, especially for youths in the rural areas (which make up roughly 50% of the population). While in other developing countries, feature phones instead of smartphones are the norm, smartphone penetration even in the rural areas in China is picking up pace thanks to local mobile phone brands which creatively imitate those of western, Korean, and Japanese powerhouse brands, and are readily available at much cheaper prices.

The challenge however remains with the content and services which are accessible to rural youths. China’s Tencent QQ, its local version of instant messenger has over 800 million users and is hugely popular amongst the youth population. High schools in China, which previously mostly banned the usage of mobile phones are now being challenged to rethink whether mobile phones should be allowed for students to access information and educational materials. While the uptake of mobile phones among rural youth does not lag too far behind those of urban youth in China (the speed of upgrading phones differs greatly of course), they lag behind in access to quality content which can “empower” them. The reality is that urban youth, especially those who attend top-tier public schools, or well-resourced private schools, would have access to the latest apps and websites (often the ones which require pay subscriptions and are recommended to them by well-connected teachers,  tutors,  and friends), while rural youth would have much little access to (and knowledge of) them.

There is thus immense opportunity for charities and social enterprises to come up with creative products to close this gap by developing free or low-cost apps and content accessible even to the poorest students: it could be ones that cultivate creativity and innovation, or ones which focus on basic literacy and practicial skills (such as city-survival skills 101). The opportunity is immense and the infrastruture is clearly ready, it’s just whether developers and other players are ready to empower this group of hungry and technology-enabled crowd or not.  A government directive would certainly help of course!

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Charlton Mak is an MBA student from the Said Business School and a Board Member of the Sowers Action Huaguang Girls’ School, which provides free highschool education for ethnic minority students in mainland China.

Continuing our series of posts by our University of Oxford students attending the Skoll World Forum, this piece is by Nathaniel Ware, an MBA student and Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford.

Almost everyone – from the academic economist to the youth activist to the local grocery-store worker – has a view on development aid. Should we give aid? If so, how much? What form should it take? These questions often prompt strong, passionate responses. A point illustrated during the panel discussion on ‘Reengineering Aid for the 21st Century’ at the Skoll World Forum.

Some may question the objectivity of having a discussion on the merits of aid at a conference celebrating a non-aid way to achieve social progress. However, this ignores the real point of the panel discussion. It was not simply about judging whether aid is good or bad (although that certainly crept into the discussion) but more about applying the social entrepreneur mindset, with a focus on innovation and sustainable social impact, to the problem of aid.

It was argued that changes are needed in the following areas:

-       The discourse on Africa: Andrew Mwenda claimed that the story of Africa needs to change from one of poverty reduction to one of wealth creation. This would improve Africa’s reputation and hopefully improve Western confidence in the region. Dambisa Moyo echoed the same point, arguing that the most transformational action Bill Gates could take would be to establish a major Microsoft Office in Africa.

-       The existence of an exit strategy: Maura O’Neill (Chief Innovation Officer of USAID) pointed out that most donors don’t have an exit strategy, but that one is necessary. We should think about the conditions that would make aid unnecessary and work to achieve these immediate goals. Aid should only be given if giving it in the short-term makes it unnecessary in the long-term.

-       The top-down approach: According to Bunker Roy, the biggest mistake people make is thinking that development can occur top-down. This is because top-down models make corruption more likely and transparency more difficult.

-       Attitudes towards risk: Governments and foundations are under pressure to guarantee a social return to tax-paying citizens and donors respectively.  As such, they often shy away from risk taking. Aid rarely goes to innovators. It was suggested that we need to embrace trial and error in aid in the same way we do with start-up businesses.

-       The duration of interventions: Dambisa Moyo argued that many interventions are long-term, which can lead to the distortion of public policy incentives and reliance by governments on donors. Short, sharp, finite interventions are better.

-       The priorities of donors: According to Paul Boateng, many donors have an obsession with working with the state while at the same time not building up the state. The building of institutions, including tax systems and legal systems that protect intellectual property, is not the first thing people think of when they think of aid, but it probably should be.

-       Asking the obvious questions: Many people on the panel pointed out that we often don’t ask the obvious questions. Dambisa Moyo stressed that we need to ask ourselves “What is the purpose of aid?” while Paul Boateng encouraged philanthropists to ask aid recipients “What are your priorities?” Obvious questions that may lead to unobvious answers.