The bold ones - high-impact entrepreneurs

Season 3, Episode 4

‘When economies turn down, entrepreneurs turn up,’ said Linda Rottenberg, CEO of the global entrepreneurship support network Endeavor. In Oxford’s Saïd’s Leadership in Extraordinary Times broadcast of 18 February 2021 she spoke to Pinar Ozcan, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, about the role of high-impact entrepreneurs in responding to the Covid-19 crisis and in ‘building forward’ for the future.

While larger, less agile companies struggled to adapt, the widespread lockdowns imposed in order to contain the spread of the virus turned out to be a catalyst for innovation and entrepreneurship—especially for tech-enabled solutions. ‘Just everyone was finding solutions!’ said Rottenberg. ‘We had coffee shops opening in Indonesia with tech-enabled solutions; we had, in every country, people finding fintech options to create opportunities for lots of mom-and-pop shops to build digital storefronts, and now – guess what – those digital storefronts are thriving.’