Paulo Savaget BA MSc MA PhD

Paulo holds a joint appointment between the Department of Engineering Science and the Saïd Business School, and his primary fields of expertise are entrepreneurship, sustainable development, systems change, and innovation management.

He formerly served as Postdoctoral Researcher at the Skoll Centre (University of Oxford) and as an Assistant Professor at Durham University.

Outside academia, he worked as an entrepreneur and as a consultant to large companies, governments, and intergovernmental organisations. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, as a Gates Scholar.

Paulo's research covers the mechanics of entrepreneurship and innovation, often through a ‘systems lens’ and with a special focus on large-scale sustainability challenges (e.g. poverty, climate change, circular economy).

Paulo engages with practitioners through action research, and he is particularly interested in exploring innovative solutions in situations where information is limited, resources are scarce, and stakes are high.

Paulo's research projects are clustered into three core research questions:

1. How can entrepreneurs catalyse changes to promptly address the SDGs?
2. How do social impact organizations conceive and pursue 'systems change'?
3. How to best accelerate ventures of vulnerable entrepreneurs and provide an ecosystem where they can flourish?

I am particularly looking for a prospective DPhil student interested in accelerators, incubators, makerspaces and other intermediaries that nurture entrepreneurial activity to address the SDGs (e.g., UNDP Accelerator Labs).

I am also interested in supervising students that want to explore new research projects that relate to my broad research interests.