Social Ventures at Oxford

Accelerating impact within business at Oxford with Dr Philippa Christoforou

Oxford has a long history of creating impactful companies. Companies such as OrganOx , which enables better delivery of organs for transplantation; Inkpath Limited , providing life-long personal development tools; and YASA , which is accelerating the electric motor revolution. Oxford University Innovation supports members of the University to build their ideas into businesses addressing needs across all aspects of people and planet.

Until recently, the values and mission of a company were embedded through practice alone and could change with each new investment round. OUI now gives founders the choice of including a mission statement in company documents, protecting the vision unless everyone involved agrees to change it.

We call these companies social ventures. To date, our social ventures have sought to fight poverty and homelessness, to share healthcare learnings with low-income communities, to support charities to do business, to enable net-zero goals to be realistically set, and to establish a new world wide web. We aim to support any founder and diversify our network so more of our companies have women and people of colour on their boards. For us, this is not just about providing equality, but unleashing the power of diversity and all the tangible benefits it brings in our companies.

My vision is that all companies from Oxford choose to embed purposeful business practices.

Oxford’s journey in supporting purposeful businesses is already well established. Many alumni founded companies that address social or environmental issues long before OUI offered this support. The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at has been instrumental in driving research and education around social entrepreneurship, social innovation and systems change for over two decades. More recently, OxReach, a crowdfunding platform for social good projects, was piloted by the development office and OUI for 5 years to raise funds for projects which fell outside of research funding but wanted to do good. Greater Change was an OxReach project which became one of our first social ventures. They provide access to finance to help people experiencing homelessness take large steps out of homelessness and have helped 672 people already.?

My vision is that all companies from Oxford choose to embed purposeful business practices. This could mean considering their environmental, social and governance (ESG) responsibilities to run an ethically strong business or being a social enterprise where the company commits to re-invest >50% of their profits into their impact mission. The spectrum of options is vast, and we can help founders find the best fit for each case.

OUI, the Oxford Sa?d Entrepreneurship Centre and EnSpire Oxford are hosting a showcase for our social ventures on the 13th April as part of the #SkollWF Marmalade festival. We’d love to see you there to network and share what’s going on in Oxford.?

The Skoll World Forum presents a unique opportunity for people at Oxford to deepen the connections we have with global change makers and social innovators. I am excited by the opportunity to collaborate with people who are advancing equitable solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.

Dr Philippa Christoforou is the Social Venture Lead at Oxford University Innovation (OUI) where she supports members of the 英国牛津大学 who wish to create impact-driven businesses. Pippa has been at OUI for 7 years, working across the whole university to support entrepreneurs. She co-ran a crowdfunding platform, OxReach, with her colleague Dr Sarah Deakin , which led to 6 impactful projects and one of their first social ventures.