SKOLL 09: Skoll director may leave if ambitions not fulfilled in a year

The new director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship wants to dramatically influence the direction of Oxford's Saïd Business School within a year - and if that doesn't happen she may walk away.

Pamela Hartigan took up the post at the centre, which is part of the Saïd Business School, in January 2009.

In an exclusive interview with Social Enterpriseduring the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, Pamela Hartigan said: 'I can get a pretty good sense of how it's going to go in a year, and I really want to drive through change quickly.'

She added that while she saw this as a long-term job she had only signed up to a one-year contract.

‘There is Pamela Hartigan time and there is Oxford time and somewhere there has to be a happy medium,' she said. ‘I'm willing to be less impatient than is my natural nature but I have to see they're willing to be less slow than is their natural time.'

Hartigan also spoke about the fact the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship was ‘not a UK-focused organisation' and it was important for her as the director to steer clear of UK social enterprise politics.

‘One of the criticisms I have about the UK social enterprise movement is it's too close to government. Social entrepreneurs are not service providers they're innovators, and government for God's sake is not innovative,' she said.

Hartigan focused on three changes she wanted to see happen quickly at the business school. Firstly, she said there needed to be a dramatic ‘beefing up' in the offering of social enterprise across core subjects in the business school through the use of new research and case studies.

‘They need to have case studies appropriate to finance in social enterprise and accounting in social enterprise so it's in the core courses and not just "here's our little elective on social enterprise".'

This was ‘because the world has changed dramatically in the last eight months and we need to respond to the demands of where our students want to go and where the world needs to go'.

Secondly, Hartigan said she hoped to find a way to challenge the points system for academics where they receive incentives for research that appears in certain journals. Many of those journals, she said, encouraged esoteric research of the type that is ‘how many social entrepreneurs can you fit on the head of a pin'.

‘The incentives are totally out of whack for the type of research which is desperately needed, which is practical and focused. And that research isn't going to get you published in the leading journals but would contribute much more to how to solve the problems of the world,' she said.

‘Social entrepreneurs are so busy solving problems that they don't have time to document anything - that's the role of academics.'

Hartigan said that, as yet, none of the research she was hoping for had begun.

Finally, Hartigan said that the Skoll Centre had to work much harder at bringing people together and gave the example of the current world forum.

‘You bring unbelievable people here and then the students and the faculty can't get in because there's no room - we have to think about how you provide that opportunity,' she said.

‘It has grown to be the pre-eminent gathering in this field but how do you infect the rest of the Oxford community with that?'

Hartigan said that she had spent the first nine weeks in the job in a string of meetings across the Oxford faculties and had already put in a bid to create a centre for climate change and the environment.

‘And Saïd is putting together a series of round table discussions where different faculties can come and share research,' she said. "We see ourselves as a hub to link the expertise in the field across the university.'

She added that she hoped to see the Social Enterprise Coalition represented at the next world forum and she had already had a positive meeting with the coalition's CEO Jonathan Bland.