David and Goliath Revisited: Partnerships between Social Entrepreneurs and Big Business
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Session Description
Location: Lecture Theatre 4
How do successful partnerships between social entrepreneurs and big business get going? What are the essential building blocks involved? What are the tensions that might arise moving forward? This session is one of two sessions that will examine four different partnerships from the perspective of each partner. Be prepared to learn, laugh and be inspired to stick with or kick-start a new collaboration.
Time & Location
Time:
14:30 - 16:00, Thursday, March 29, 2012
BST
Speakers
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Speaker
Managing Partner, PTI Advisors
Paul is an evangelist and a practitioner of social innovation. Having worked for iconic companies like Gateway, Compaq and Hewlett Packard, he’s been on the front line of technology’s impact on society and planet. He’s experienced the power of business, government, and civil society working collectively to achieve breakthrough change. With PTI Advisors, he works with a diverse array of leaders and organizations around the world who bring a global citizen mind-set to innovation and who embrace sustainability and responsible leadership like never before. He’s especially inspired by the young leaders and entrepreneurs he works with and mentors. Paul lives in the west of Ireland.
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Speaker
Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer, Embrace
Jane Chen is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Embrace Innovations, a social enterprise that aims to help the 20 million premature and low birth weight babies born every year, through a low cost infant warmer. The Embrace Infant Warmer costs less than 1% of a traditional incubator, and has helped over 50,000 babies to date. The company's vision is to create a line of affordable healthcare technologies for women and children around the world.
Chen is a TED Senior Fellow, and was selected as one of Forbes' Impact 30 in 2011. She was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2012, and a Schwab Social Entrepreneur in 2013. She and her co-founders recently won the 2013 Economist Innovation Award.
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Speaker
Gene Falk is one of the few people to lead major ventures in both Fortune 500 companies and the non-profit sector. Building on this experience, he founded and heads strategic consulting firm FalkAdvisors|DGB whose mission is to help funders and the not-for-profits they support achieve the best results from their collaborations, avoiding risks and pain points, and sidestepping obstacles that rapidly burn through money, time and other valuable resources.
Previously, Gene headed mothers2mothers (m2m) and was a recipient of a Skoll Award for this work. Prior to that, Gene was a senior executive at Showtime and HBO.
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Speaker
Director (2009-2016), Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship
Dr. Pamela Hartigan was Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School at the University of Oxford from 2009 until her passing in 2016. She was also founding partner of Volans Ventures, an organization focused on building innovative scalable solutions to challenges affecting our future.
Prior to starting Volans, Dr. Hartigan spent eight years as the Founding Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a sister organization of the World Economic Forum, where she was also a member of the Managing Board.
Of Ecuadorian origin, Dr. Hartigan first came to the United States at 17 years of age to study at Georgetown University; she went on to complete a PhD in human developmental psychology at the Catholic University of America. Throughout her career, she held varied leadership positions in multilateral organizations and educational institutions, as well as in entrepreneurial ventures. She was responsible for conceptualizing and creating new organizations, departments, and programs across a variety of institutions and platforms.
Dr. Hartigan was a frequent lecturer on entrepreneurship and innovation at graduate business schools in the USA, Europe, and Asia, and an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia Business School and at the University of Technology Sydney. She co-authored a book with John Elkington, founder of SustainAbility (UK), entitled The Power of Unreasonable People: How Entrepreneurs Create Markets to Change the World, which was published by Harvard Business Press in 2008.
She was a trustee of social investment organizations, publicly listed companies, and social impact focused organizations around the world.
Dr. Pamela Hartigan died on August 12, 2016, at her home in France.
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Speaker
Director, Business for Social Responsibility
I've spent 20 years working at the nexus between private sector innovation, sustainable markets and social development. I'm passionate about enabling entrepreneurial innovation within corporations in collaboration with civil society, development and impact investing partners. I've had the pleasure of driving and supporting the development of inclusive business models for low income communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
I believe social entrepreneurship and impact investing are exciting fields, yet are not reaching scale and financial sustainability nearly quickly enough. Likewise, progressive corporations are driving exciting innovations in inclusive business and governments are reconceiving the role of entrepreneurial innovation in aid, but progress is too much slow.
Breaking down the barriers and fostering new forms of partnership between these groups holds the key to more rapidly scalable, sustainable models that can make markets work for all. That's my mission, and day job - I'm interested in meeting people who also want to make that happen!
Other focus topics and areas of expertise include healthcare, agriculture, food & nutrition, innovative financing, climate change, human rights, supply chains, business ethics, CSR and leadership development.
