Pamela Hartigan is Executive Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School at the University of Oxford. She is also founding partner of Volans Ventures, an organization launched in 2008 and focused on building innovative scalable solutions to challenges affecting our future. Prior to starting Volans, Dr. Hartigan spent eight years as the first Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a sister organization of the World Economic Forum where she was also on the Forum Managing Board. The Schwab Foundation is focused on advancing the practice of social entrepreneurship globally, building and supporting its community of practitioners whose efforts have achieved transformational social change.
Throughout her career, she has held varied leadership positions in multilateral health organizations and educational institutions as well as in entrepreneurial non-profits. She has been responsible for conceptualizing and creating new organizations, departments or programs across a variety institutional arrangements and multi-stakeholder platforms. She is currently on the Boards or Advisory Committees of the following social enterprises: CAMBIA (Australia), INDEX (Denmark), GEXSI (Germany), the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation (USA); Mobile Metrix (Brazil), Red Redemption (UK), The Story Museum (UK) and Ventures in Development (China). A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., she also holds Masters' degrees in Economics and Public Health and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology.
Dr. Hartigan is a frequent lecturer on social entrepreneurship and innovation at graduate schools of business in the USA, Europe and Asia, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia Business School. Her book, co-authored with John Elkington, founder of SustainAbility (UK) and entitled The Power of Unreasonable People: How Entrepreneurs Create Markets to Change the World has just been published by Harvard Business Press in February 2008.
