From eBay to Social Entrepreneurship
When Jeff Skoll became the first full-time employee and president of eBay, he had two failed businesses behind him. But he wrote a business plan that led this start-up company to legendary success. It was so successful, in fact, that when he cashed out a portion of the company, he joined the ranks of the world's billionaires.
He could be spending the rest of his life on golf courses, private jets and luxury yachts. Instead, he has founded Participant Media, a company that has funded Oscar-winning feature films and documentaries that promote social values; and the Skoll Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which is behind the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University.
This week, the Skoll Centre has been hosting its annual Skoll World Forum for around 800 of the world's leading social entrepreneurs from 65 countries. Prominent figures from the public, academic, finance, corporate and policy sectors have engaged with them in debates, discussions and workshops focused on accelerating, innovating and scaling market-based solutions to some of the world's most pressing social issues.
The climax of the 3-day Forum is the giving of the Skoll Foundation Awards. This year's recipients included a young woman called Soraya Salti. She left a job in business consultancy to join INJAZ al-Arab, the only education programme in the Arab world that helps students learn entrepreneurship and life skills as part of their school education.
Another awardee, Gary White, is the founder of WaterPartners International. Over twenty years ago in Guatemala, he watched a young girl carry contaminated water back to her shack alongside a stream of open sewage. At that moment he decided to dedicate his life to helping poor people gain access to safe drinking water but in a way that was commercially viable.
Similar stories of vision, passion, risk and adventure have poured forth, not only from the podium but in hundreds of hushed conversations in darkened streets and college precincts. It is as if the dreaming spires above have born silent testimony to the enduring values of stewardship and responsibility that put such things as entrepreneurial skills and a cup of clean water in the hands of a poor child.
For the faith that inspired those spires teaches us that the hands that receive them are Christ's own. It's the kind of faith that inspires business plans for start-ups from people who have failed more than once in business but who have a social conscience. The impact can be transformative. It can even help lift the global economy from its knees.
Peter Heslam
Further Reading
Transforming Business is a research and development project focused on enterprise solutions to poverty. Directed by Peter Heslam, it website contains lots of resources relevant both to commercial and to social entrepreneurship. For an article by Peter Heslam on 'philanthrocapitalism' following Warren Buffet's donation of US$37m to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006 and published in Faith in Business Quarterly, click here.
Matthew Bishop and Michael Green have jointly published Philanthrocapitalism: How the rich can save the world and why we should let them (A & C Black, 2008). A sharply critical treatment of Bishop and Green's views, and of philanthrocapitalism in general, is Michael Edwards' Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism (Demos, 2008).
The Skoll Foundation has backed Ashoka, a global association of leading social entrepreneurs, founded by Bill Drayton. A best-selling book that tells the stories of some of these social entrepreneurs is David Bornstein's How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (OUP, 2004).
Pamela Hartigan has just been appointed Director of Oxford's Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. Together with John Elkington, she has written The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World(Harvard Business School Press, 2008).
Martin Clark is a young Cambridge-based social entrepreneur and has just published The Social Entrepreneur Revolution: Doing good by making money, making money by doing good (Marshall Cavendish 2009). It follows Lord Andrew Mawson's The Social Entrepreneur: Making Communities Work (Atlantic Books, 2008).
The Innovations journal was only founded in 2006 but is already becoming one of the leading journals in the field of entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. It features case studies authored by exceptional innovators and includes research and commentary from leading academics. The journal is co-hosted by MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship.
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