Most of the students that I meet,
wherever they want to go,
they don't want to just have a job,
they want to have a job that's going
to mean something.
Oxford SAID Business
School is really dedicated
to advancing the field
of social entrepreneurship.
What makes the Skoll Centre really special
is that it sits at the nexus
of theory and practice.
We connect this incredible community
of brilliant thinkers all across Oxford
with an extraordinary community
of practitioners and social innovators
all over the world.
We have students from
56 different countries.
We have students who
are coming from, really,
every sector, from education,
from healthcare, environment.
My role is to support the passion
of the students and practitioners
to really affect change.
I think we're at a real inflection point
as a society and maybe as a species.
In my lifetime we've
seen many, many reasons
for optimism, but at the same time
there are a lot of things
happening right now
that are really disconcerting.
Climate change, income inequality,
mass migrations of refugees.
Where we go is going to be determined
by the next generation,
and so helping that generation to succeed
feels like the right thing
to be doing right now.
The definition of
entrepreneurship is being able
to seize an opportunity
and build something
regardless of the resources
that are available
at that moment.
What that means is no matter where we are,
or who's engaged in
entrepreneurial activity,
they should have an opportunity to start.
I think it wouldn't
actually take very much
activation energy to unlock a torrent
of innovation around the world.
In my experience in trying
to create large scale
social change, it's a team sport.
And it's always about
more than one person.
The best leaders have
the ability to mobilize
people across sectors and
form unlikely coalitions.
So much of social entrepreneurship
can't be necessarily
learned in the classroom.
You have to learn it by doing and so we're
working really hard to
make sure that students
have opportunities to work with social
entrprenuershiped organizations to work
with entrepreneurs, to
get their hands dirty,
so to speak, and really start doing stuff.
For me, success for the Centre is going to
be measured not by the number of people
that we train or the number of papers
that are published from here,
but what all of those
people do when they leave.
