On Feb. 5, the Center for Business, Health, and Prosperity at the David Eccles School of Business celebrated its opening with a virtual event. The center has been established to promote societal prosperity by integrating value-creating innovation and entrepreneurship with improved health.
The center’s goal is to help communities “thrive by driving opportunity” and use entrepreneurship to drive social change. During the event, Dean Taylor Randall spoke, saying, “This is a remarkable undertaking that is going to transform our school in so many ways.”
According to Stephen Alder, executive director of the new center, “We have opportunities like never before to bring together value-creating business with enabling health practices to create opportunities for people to thrive. The Center for Business, Health, and Prosperity creates the vehicle through which we can develop constellation of fields and disciplines that can be harnessed to increase prosperity throughout the world.”
Jay Barney, academic co-director for the center, recounted the remarkable experiences he had visiting Ghana in the past and, with his students, working to develop programs that helped drive economic opportunity for many small businesses in the area. That experience is what led to his support of a center that would merge the concepts of business, health, and prosperity into a single, unifying project.
Keynote Speaker Martyn Mensah, global entrepreneur and philanthropist and founding partner of StratAfrique Consulting, spoke about his decades of experience developing business in the region. “By harnessing the creative genius of the entrepreneur and applying it to health, we will see the increase of prosperity,” Mensah says. “It can transform not only Africa, but the world.”
To learn more about the Center for Business, Health, and Prosperity visit their website at Eccles.Link/BHP