RAISE YOUR AMBITION AND DREAM BIG!

Raised in India, attaining a PhD in computer science at Berkeley University in the late eighties, and since then winning a string of top business school leadership roles from New York to INSEAD in France; Soumitra Dutta, Peter Moores Dean at the Saïd Business School and a fellow of Balliol College, could hardly have had a more glittering career.

In his current role since 2022, he says that his first experience of Oxford was simply as a parent – dropping off his daughter in 2011 to study computational biology. He had no idea then that he would a decade later land the job of Dean of Oxford’s business school, or ‘Oxford Saïd’ as he prefers to call it, an important detail.

What distinguishes Oxford from other business school models is, he argues, its embeddedness in a great university.

‘It’s true,’ he says, ‘MBA students can often exhibit a narrow career focus. They want to get the qualification and move on.’

But they still have to have a berth in one of Oxford’s 39 colleges, in order to study for a business degree at the leading University, and that broader interaction is very important. ‘I urge them to be intellectually curious. Oxford is the right place for a curious mind. It’s an intellectual Disneyland.’

He takes it as a given that the role of business leaders is to solve big problems, not merely to make bucks, not only noting the way that Oxford struck that landmark deal with pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca to make a COVID-19 vaccine for global distribution at cost price in emerging markets, but simply in light of climate change realities and spiralling global inequality.

‘These are huge, multi-stakeholder challenges,’ he notes. ‘The role the business school  is to define what role business has to play in being part of the solution.’

He says that he has in particular stepped up cross-collaboration with other parts of the University including the University’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division (MPLS) and The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. The latter was created in 2008 through the generosity of Sir Martin and Lady Elise Smith, and their family, who believed that without business at the heart of discussions around climate and the environment, there would be little meaningful progress.

Just half a kilometre away from the current Oxford Saïd site adjacent to Oxford’s railway station is the brownfield regeneration project of the Oxford Saïd Global Leadership Centre, due to be completed in 2025. So in this way building out and burrowing in, you can see how the business school is becoming a more integrated, knitted-up component of the collegiate University under Dutta’s leadership.

The entire conversation around the role of business in the world should be conducted in this integrated way, he says.

In our conversation, this unfolds partly around Oxford’s excellent track record in innovation and the commercialisation and scaling of Oxford-originating intellectual property from research; and partly around the need to address emerging markets with products and outreach from Oxford Saïd that will reach much greater numbers of constituents than can be reached by even the most munificent scholarships bringing a few hundred golden ticket holders to study in person in Oxford.

‘How can we bring the magic to emerging markets?’ he asks.

‘We have to keep on innovating,’ he says, readily acknowledging that not everything will work. He talks about changing the design of products to create short term courses, story-led by individuals within the target market – say Africa, or India, perhaps women entrepreneurs – to impart knowledge but perhaps more importantly, confidence.

‘What if we could create a Netflix-like service for lifelong learning?’

Another project already underway involves a High School student targeted climate contest, The Oxford Saïd-Burjeel Holdings Climate Change Challenge.

Soumitra says that on the first running of this past year they received more than 600 applications from more than 43 countries, and the student prize went to the Acquifier Guardians, who were presented with their prize at COP28 in the UAE and attend the business school’s first Future Climate Innovators summer school in August.

Turning to Oxford’s own, in-house entrepreneurial climate, Soumitra says it is very strong seen globally, trailing MIT and Stanford by a small margin for spin-out companies.

What Oxford has done well, he explains, is to create an unusual multi-tier funding environment that starts with Oxford University Innovation, to help academics and students to protect their IP and initiate the journey towards a commercial identity, but then crucially progressing upwards to Oxford Science Enterprise where further funding can help the otherwise perilous journey towards scaling-up.

He acknowledges the difficulties of a funding environment right now, where in the UK not enough liquidity is available for start-ups, but especially at the so-called ‘mezzanine’ level, the intermediate layer that lies between the initial seed money and later, mature funding rounds that tends to attract institutions. Too many promising companies fold for lack of patient capital at this point, where Oxford Science Enterprise is there to plug the gap.

Coming back to where we are as a world, as a conversation, Soumitra says that he sees his role as rethinking what education and research feels like for the twenty-first century, bearing in mind that the century is already almost a quarter done – scarcely believable we agree.

Oxford Saïd’s new Global Leadership Centre will, he says, create a very ‘technology intensive environment, both digital and personal,’ acknowledging the central theme of his career – technology in its myriad forms, both enhancing life and becoming problematic, the subject of a forthcoming book he is writing about digital promise and digital inequality.

In many ways an entrepreneur in his own right who could have worked in Silicon Valley, Dutta says his family were all medics so the real ‘swerve’ was to pursue a business career – then finding that he was very good at administration and leadership.

Before coming to Oxford he was the founding Dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, New York. Before that he was Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, also at Cornell, and Deputy Dean at INSEAD in France.

He loves the US and says that ideally every student would have a bit of time there to ‘get injected with the can-do attitude that defines the place, the energy’.

Soumitra says he loves Oxford and is very happy here. It was never originally on his map but that is the best hallmark of a good career, that you set your sights but don’t try to too narrowly predetermine how they will unfold.

‘Discovering Oxford over these past two years is a journey that never ends and never stops giving,’ he says.

‘I say always, raise your ambition and dream big!’ And then I say, OK, now we have the title for the article!