Social Entrepreneurship

So I (Gobion) gave a talk to the MBA students at Saïd Business School at Oxford University as part of a day on "Conversations on Social Innovation and entrepreneurship"

The day was organised by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, the Institute for Science Innovation and the Oxford University Society and Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and I was fortunate to be invited along as one of the social entrepreneurs. The day was organised by the fantastic Pamela Hartigan.

The keynote speaker was Mel Young, from the excellent Homeless World Cup. His talk was awesome, and until that day I had no idea how Mel is the spitting image of a war criminal - which makes international travel tricky! The Homeless World Cup is a inspiring event and locus of social change and I recommend you check it out.

It was an inspiring day, designed to give the MBA students a feel of what potential there is out there for interesting social innovation, and overall from the feedback I received the event was very successful at achieving those aims. The students felt very fired up by the conversations they had with the social entrepreneurs.

My talk was on my background, our business and structure, our most notable projects and current game Climate Challenge 2010 (I will post up an edited version of my PDF shortly).

My audience was from around the world (USA, Italy, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia and Bulgaria) and it was really great to get talking to them about their experiences and backgrounds. They asked a lot of smart questions, which I expected, but were also far more switched on about social entrepreneurship that I had thought they would be.

It does seem though that games are a common language that is shared across much of the world and that is exciting to see. We had all played games most of our lives, and even shared a few favourites. My audience was very excited about the possibility of games addressing social issues whilst still remaining fun/challenging commercial games.

I look forward to more opportunities like this.

As an aside, several people asked me what "Social Entrepreneurship" is. My view is that is it regular entrepreneurship but just making sure you include the people you work with, the communities you work in and the planet in your business planning :)