A record of making good things happen.

About Mark Mann. An intrapreneur.



In five years I kick-started social science and humanities start-ups at Oxford University, launched social ventures support and then set up a fund between twelve universities - here's how:

I started life as a nanotechnology researcher before making a complete change and joining the BBC. There, I tried everything from tracking Tom Daley's swim shorts to bringing live audio from the terraces at football matches (but without the swearing) to BBC radio listeners. However, the key chapter came next when I began working at Oxford University Innovation (OUI) and the world of social entrepreneurship.

OUI gets research out of the door in two useful ways.  Either it licenses it to someone who can use it (like licensing the vaccine to AstraZeneca), or it sets up a company to sell it. This is great if you want to make money but if you've worked with academics, then you'll know that they aren't really in it for the money, and many dedicate their lives to solving social problems. So, how could we help them?

Getting a nine-hundred-year-old university to change what it does isn't easy, but with some amazing colleagues, that's what we did in three years. I gained formal backing from the University to allow OUI to create social ventures for the first time and a sizeable budget to do it properly. Within a few months I helped launch the first, sOPHIa, a ground breaking new way to measure and tackle poverty. We designed the template legal documents for an Oxford University social enterprise, their mission, how they'd measure success and brought in the legal expertise to back them. Within two years we went from zero to a pipeline of twenty social ventures. The floodgates were open as we had a vehicle to fit the aspirations of many academics.

The burgeoning pipeline was a welcome problem and precipitated the biggest challenge yet; to find financing for all these ventures. We needed a fund. Funds are not easy to setup. To be cost effective they typically start at £10m and to run a £10m fund, you need a large pipeline of ventures for them to pick the right ones to invest in - Oxford alone couldn't do this. That's where I pulled together the Impact 12 group; twelve universities across the middle of the UK whose combined social ventures would form the pipeline for an impact investment fund - Impact12. We slowly pieced together a shared vision, gained agreement, did feasibility studies, spoke to funders found our partner to run it in SIS ventures and somehow, despite many obstacles and a pandemic, we launched this year, the world's first university-focused impact investment fund.

From supporting start-ups, science and non-science, social ventures, board management, setting up a fund and an ecosystem and, yes, stakeholder management in some of the most complex institutions, I think that has to be intrapreneurship and I'm open to more.

Mark is an experienced venture and ecosystem builder who has specialised in social innovation and brand-building strategies. He is a Registered Technology Transfer Professional (RTTP) and provides many training courses through PraxisAuril, ASTP, AESIS and other organisations.