After several years in the non-profit sector, Blair Miller decided that she wanted to move away from positions in think tanks and policy-focused organisations and acquire some more hands on experience.

She is now business development manager at Acumen Fund, which uses philanthropic funds to identify and support entrepreneurs serving poor markets. But before making the transition to the more entrepreneurial side of the non-profit sector, she decided to take an MBA: “I wanted the practical skills in business, from marketing to operations and statistics.”

She chose the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. In addition to the fact that she had been an undergraduate there, she was also drawn by the presence on the school’s faculty of C.K. Prahalad, a pioneer of the “bottom of the pyramid” business model that targets the world’s poorest people.

Today, Ms Miller says she can apply what she learned to her work at Acumen Fund. “Coming from a non-profit background, you don’t have that rigour of the private sector with training and mentoring,” she says. “So it helped me use different structures for the problems of development in a way that I had not done before.”

In addition to the knowledge she gained of marketing, finance and accounting, Ms Miller says that the programme helped her in other ways.

“The cultural gap between the business and social sectors is enormous and often underestimated.

“I learned the culture and language of business from classmates and professors,” she says.

Ms Miller also believes that being able to communicate effectively with people from the business sector can help with raising funds.