Skoll World Forum - "Social Entrepreneurship: The 21st Century Revolution" - Delivered at Saïd Business School, Oxford University
By Jeff Skoll, 03.30.04

Thank you for the warm introduction. I could get used to having His Royal Highness as a warm-up act before my speeches!

I am gratified and honored to be here tonight in the presence of so many remarkable people and, indeed, it is with the greatest pride and pleasure that I'm able to address you at this, the first Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

Insofar as making a speech, I'm at somewhat of a disadvantage, given that this is an inaugural event involving people at the forefront of so many innovative and unique initiatives. So I have relatively few precedents upon which to draw. Or to put it more plainly, I'm in the unfortunate position of not being able to recycle any of my old speeches.

However, as I reflected on what I wanted to say tonight, it struck me that some historical perspective would be in order. In particular, the main message that I had hoped to convey is the urgency presented by the problems facing the world today and the critical importance of the role of social entrepreneurs, of our role in addressing these problems.

When I originally drafted my remarks for tonight, they began as follows:

"The rapid industrial and technological advancements of the last century have led to many breakthroughs, but they have also left us to confront an uncertain future. With real threats of environmental and economic collapse, terrible diseases, over-population, war, terrorism and menacing new forms of weaponry, we have much to overcome. Efforts by our governments and institutions have proven insufficient to reverse these destructive trends. Our best hope for the future of humanity lies in the power and effectiveness of socially motivated, highly empowered individuals to fight for changes in the way we live, think and behave."

There. That statement, those four sentences, exemplify to me the very real and the very urgent need for the work and the goals that we are fighting for.

But something else occurred to me when I thought about it, as I suspect it may be occurring to many of you now. That those exact same words could have been said 100 years ago. And 200 years ago. And 300 years ago at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And in some similar form, those words could have been said, with equal truth and with equal immediacy, in virtually every era dating back to the dawn of humanity.

One of the great ironies of history is that the solutions that arise to challenges frequently create new challenges even more menacing. Industries that have improved the quality of our lives have also created new problems that threaten our very existence. Technological innovations that were developed to increase the efficiency of life have frequently been used to increase the efficiency of taking life. Our world today has weapons that our ancestors could never have imagined, but the peculiar human desire to use such weapons has, sadly, remained unchanged.

We can split the atom, walk on the moon, communicate with another person anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye, and yet poverty, violence and illness in much of the world are as bad [as] or worse than they have ever been.

But the nature and the wonder of humanity is that while there are always tumultuous events and seemingly overwhelming challenges to face, people, exceptional individuals and ideas and movements emerge to face and find solutions to these challenges.

And so to all of us here, who have the ambition and ability to make our communities a better place, to the visionaries who strive to improve the lives of everyone they can reach, to the social entrepreneurs who want to change the course of the world for the better, I say: This is our time.

As each generation has produced exceptional people to contend with the challenges that history has deposited in their laps, all of you here tonight are the exceptional people of our generation. This is our time.

Social entrepreneurs have a unique approach that is both evolutionary and revolutionary. Social entrepreneurs create self-sustainable models that operate in a free market where success is measured not just in financial profit, but in the improvement of the quality of people's lives. Social entrepreneurs take workable business models and adapt them for the benefit of all our communities.

Make no mistake about it, with social entrepreneurship, we're talking about nothing less than the democratization of power.

In the past, governments and powerful individuals and corporations could dictate where and how resources were allocated. But with social entrepreneurship, any individual has the potential to make positive changes not just in our communities, but in society as a whole.

But the stakes are high and the cost of failure is great. There are many who believe that "caring" for society is something best handled by government, perhaps supplemented by charitable and religious organizations.

While all of those institutions are important to a well-functioning social order, many of the problems they've set out to solve remain unsolved, if not worse than ever.

And so it's up to us to succeed in order to ensure that the failures of the past don't become the failures of the future.

It is a tall order. But having met many of you over the years and seeing you tonight, I'm filled with optimism and hope. In the grand scheme of things, social entrepreneurship is still in its infancy, but already there are so many outstanding successes - successes brought about by individuals, some of whom you'll have an opportunity to hear and meet at this forum.

People like Professor Muhammad Yunus, who revolutionized economics by founding the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, offering micro-loans to help impoverished people attain economic self-sufficiency through self-employment, a model that has helped over 67 million people and has been replicated in 58 countries around the world.

People like Bill Strickland, a man who was convinced that the poor and disenfranchised people in his community deserved to have hope and decency in their lives. Bill founded the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, which provides practical and artistic training, as well as inspiration, to thousands of young people in Pittsburgh, and he is now building similar centers throughout the U.S.

People like Martin Fisher, founder of ApproTEC in Kenya. With an innovative approach to adapting Western technology, particularly with water pumps, ApproTEC has been able to help subsistence farmers get better yields from their crops at very little cost. Today, over 30,000 businesses have been created in Kenya with ApproTEC equipment, and these businesses account for more than 0.5 percent of Kenya's GDP. That's society-wide change.

These people haven't just changed lives; they've saved them. These are people like many of you. Social entrepreneurs.

In the case of eBay, a company that I helped to build, we came into social entrepreneurship almost by accident. What seemed like a good business idea became an environmentally friendly, global marketplace that broke down geographic barriers to commerce and helped facilitate both livelihoods and communication for millions of people around the world. With eBay, anyone can trade virtually anything, anywhere at any time on a level playing field. A craftsperson in Nepal can sell his or her wares alongside major corporations on an equivalent and often even on an advantageous basis.

David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, is here tonight. In his book, David draws on research from Les Salamon, who is also here, and points out that over the last 20 years, the growth of employment in the social sector in the developed world has been two and one-half times faster than it has been for the economy as a whole. Growth in the developing world has been even more incredible: In countries such as Slovakia and Indonesia, the number of citizen groups has multiplied a thousandfold.

Social entrepreneurs: This is our time!

Before he died, I had the good fortune to meet John Gardner, the former president of the Carnegie Foundation and Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Health and Education, who engineered that administration's watershed "Great Society" programs. I asked John what he thought would be the one factor that would be most instrumental in creating a better world for the future. He thought for a minute and said, "The most important thing we can do is to bet on good people doing good things." Bet on good people doing good things.

You are those good people. Social entrepreneurs are the practical dreamers who have the talent and the skill and the vision to solve the problems, to change the world for the better.

That's why this forum was created: so that we can meet each other, share knowledge and celebrate our successes. Together we can create better strategies for positive social change than each of us can create on our own.

And so, in that spirit, welcome to the first of what will be many such gatherings for the world's change makers here at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford.

Enjoy the conference, enjoy the presentations and, most of all, enjoy each other!

Thank you.