Social entrepreneurs, funders, business, and civil society leaders want to create systemic impact. But how can we best measure progress towards systems change? In this interactive workshop, participants will dive into case studies and explore different approaches to addressing this question. Attendees will walk away with a stronger understanding of both the challenges of capturing systemic impact and how they might apply new measurement methodologies in their own systems work.
A medic, public health specialist and social entrepreneur, Dr Peter Drobac is the Executive Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford Said Business School. For nearly two decades, the Skoll Centre has equipped entrepreneurial leaders for impact within and beyond business.
Having worked for many years with Partners In Health to transform health systems in some the world's poorest communities, Peter was co-founder and first Executive Director of the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda. Ever the builder, Peter arrived in an 800 year-old university only to join Oxford's first 21st century college, Reuben College.
In addition to teaching systems leadership and social innovation, Peter is currently focused on initiatives to build better systems in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. He frequently comments on global health issues for CNN, BBC and other outlets, in addition to hosting the Reimagine podcast.
Director, School of System Change, Forum for the Future
Anna is Director at Forum for the Future where she leads their systems change capacity building work. She found the School of System Change which seeks to build an international learning community of change makers using systemic practices to address complex challenges of our times. She also runs and coaches a number of initiatives including the Marine CoLAB and works with organisations from foundations such as OSF, Caluste Gulbenkian, civil society organisations and businesses. She also cultivates living change inquiries into deeper questions that look to challenge the deeper structures and mental models of the way we live and work. She is the author of Cultivating System Change: A practitioners companion which is based on her PhD of the same title.
Professor Alex Nicholls MBA is the first tenured professor in social entrepreneurship appointed at the University of Oxford and was the first staff member of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in 2004. His research interests range across several key areas within social entrepreneurship and social innovation, including: social and impact investment; the nexus of relationships between accounting, accountability, and governance; public and social policy contexts; and Fair Trade.
To date Nicholls has published more than one hundred papers, working papers, book chapters and articles and six books. Most appear in a wide range of peer reviewed journals and books, including five papers in Financial Times Top 30 journals. He has over ten thousand citations of his work. His 2009 paper on social investment won the Best Paper Award (Entrepreneurship) at the British Academy of Management. In 2010, Nicholls edited a Special Edition of Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice on social entrepreneurship – the first time a top tier management journal had recognized the topic in this way. He is the General Editor of the Skoll Working Papers Series and the Editor of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.
Nicholls is also the co-author of a major research book on Fair Trade (with Charlotte Opal, Sage, 2005) and the editor of a collection of key papers on social entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2006, 2008). Both represent the best selling and most cited academic books on their subjects in the world. In 2011, Nicholls published a co-edited volume on social innovation – the first scholarly book on the subject. In 2015, he published a co-edited volume on social finance (again, the first academic collection on the subject) and a new book on social innovation with NESTA. In 2020, Nicholls published a book examining the economics underpinnings of social innovation in the European Union as a product of the CRESSI project.
