Peter Heslam and Eric Wood

Competition: 2010 Open RFP

Peter Heslam

Dr. Peter Heslam is Director of Transforming Business, a multi-disciplinary research and development project at the University of Cambridge that analyzes and catalyzes enterprise solutions to poverty. He works particularly closely with entrepreneurs, leaders of multinational corporations and business academics and educators around the world. Peter's academic background covers social science, history, theology and ethics and he holds degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. A prolific writer, speaker and researcher on the role of business in human development, he is the author of the bestselling short book Transforming Capitalism: Entrepreneurship and the Renewal of Thrift and is the recipient of a number of awards. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and serves as an adviser to Business Fights Poverty, Beyond Profit, and the Journal of Markets and Morality. He has also been a judge in SEVEN’s Pioneers of Prosperity competition.

Eric Wood

Dr. Eric Wood has a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Cape Town and an Economics PhD from Cambridge. He is Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Graduate School of Business, UCT and teaches in those fields at the GSB, and at business schools in the Netherlands and Namibia. He has a variety of international research collaborations and has published in the leading entrepreneurship journals. He acquired a majority stake in a loss-making business and managed a successful turn-around. He is a business angel and serves as a non-executive director in a young venture in the biotech industry. Eric consults to start-up and established businesses, focusing on practices which increase their potential to create value. Seeing organizations become more rewarding for all their stakeholders lights Eric’s fire.

Project Summary

Belief in Enterprise is a nine-month research project based on two key research findings. First, the creation of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is crucial to economic development. Second, religion helps create the social capital necessary for successful enterprise.

This research project focuses on the convergence of the rise of Christianity and the rise of entrepreneurship. It does so in order to advance understanding of how this confluence helps address one of the greatest moral and practical challenges of the 21st century – the elimination of poverty.

Christianity is the world’s largest religion, its adherents constituting about a third of humanity. It is also rapidly growing, particularly in developing countries. Many of these countries are also undergoing fast-paced social and economic change that many commentators describe as an entrepreneurial revolution.
Despite burgeoning interest in development, entrepreneurship, and religion, the nexus between these three fields is largely ignored. We believe this is to the detriment of finding people-centered, culturally-embedded and sustainable solutions to poverty.

We intend, therefore, to take a multi-disciplinary approach focused on the grass-roots of value creation in developing contexts. We will explore how the faith of Christian entrepreneurs influences their sense of vocation, the way they run their companies and the social and environmental impact of their core business activities, especially when faced with risk and uncertainty.

Our outputs will target a variety of audiences that mirror our multi-disciplinary approach and our engagement with practitioners as well as academics. In doing so, we intend to analyze and catalyze enterprise solutions to poverty that promote human and environmental flourishing, for the good of all.