Miller Magazine Issue: 152 August 2022

86 ARTICLE MILLER / AUGUST 2022 contract between companies and society to take care of the next generation for the good of the community. “It means we can send our students into industry rather than an academic laboratory or they can spend a semester in an exchange with a real company. It gives them exposure and al- lows businesses to see talent, which means together we bring up the next generation of talent,” said Martin Vetterli President of EPFL Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Speakers warned that the traditional model of episodic ed- ucation that ended with university was no longer fit for pur- pose when catering for a dynamic job market requiring con- stant reskilling. “The question to ask is: ‘How are you in your organization engaging in reskilling and upskilling and using university infrastructure to help do that?’” said Ranjay Gulati, Harvard Professor of Business Administration. “Learning is now a lifelong endeavor and companies need to ask how they are helping their employees to not get locked into a way of thinking about things and to keep constantly challenging themselves.” WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT INEQUALITY President and CEO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Peter Bakker, described the three biggest challenges of our time as the climate emer- gency, loss of nature, and mounting inequality. “I think most of you will by now have got the memo on climate change,” he told delegates. “I would argue that you are not yet comfortable with your role when it comes to in- equality. When we are all back in this room [in three years] inequality will be as urgent as climate change is today, so- ciety is no longer going to put up with big differences in wealth with deep structural difference in access to oppor- tunities.” He warned the time had come for business to start talking about inequality, system transformation, the need to innovate, behavior change and financial flows. DRIVING MEANINGFUL CHANGE When it comes to improving diversity among new en- trepreneurs, Izzy Obeng, CEO of Foundervine, a start-up accelerator dedicated to removing the social and econom- ic barriers faced by today’s entrepreneurs, presented the Networking Days audience with some stark statistics. She told the conference that only one cent in every Euro of venture capital funding went to all female teams in 2020, with 15 cent in the Euro going to mixed gender founding teams. In comparison 84 cents in the Euro goes to all male founding teams. Only 38 black entrepreneurs managed to raise venture capital funding between 2009 and 2019, rep- resenting only half a percent of the total capital allocated over the 10 years. Obeng told delegates that no black led venture funds in Europe have ever raised significant insti- tutional funding to invest in founders. Foundervine has to date helped over 5,000 leaders in the UK gain the skills to grow businesses and raise investment.