Three Unconventional Lessons For Business School Students

It’s unusual when a successful entrepreneur opens a presentation to a room full of business school students with a photograph of her twin baby boys. But then Jessica Jackley isn’t a typical entrepreneur. As one of the speakers of a three-year series funded by the Pears Foundation at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, entrepreneur …

The Case for Catalytic Funding of Latino-focused Startups

[Note: If you're interested in the updated and much-improved version of this pitch--especially if you're a Latino-focused entrepreneur--my gmail address is mark.c.hand.] This year, the Saïd Business School at Oxford launches GOTO, an ambitious project to focus the university’s attention on a particular topic of global import. The first topic is demography, with a focus on …

Social Entrepreneurship 101

In 2013 I co-authored a post on the Skoll Centre blog called "Social Entrepreneurship 101. That blog linkrotted in 2020, so here's the full text, thanks to the Wayback Machine.  “Social Entrepreneurship,” according to one definition, “strives to solve social problems at a systemic level using innovative, sustainable, scalable, inclusive and measurable approaches.” What? In the 1980s, …

Oxford Week Zero: Brain Fuel

As first impressions go, Oxford does a bang-up job.The most impressive bit? The breadth and depth of conversation. Topics from the week: Transitional justice and Brazil's Truth Commission, investigating crimes committed during the military dictatorship of the 60s-80s Twitter's efforts to establish a European sales office and their struggle to build a functional search tool …