Dear Mr. Gates:
What if the business sector could make a fair profit by increasing the impact of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation a hundred-fold? Your foundation already has remarkable impact on our world. In describing your work to reduce neonatal deaths ( http://bit.ly/3CeBgwX ), you make the case for the power of co-creation among ecosystem stakeholders – and the power of iterative innovations arising out of that collaboration. Now imagine the impact of such collaboration if it became mainstreamed within the business sector.
How could that happen?
Businesses must continually innovate how they create, deliver, and capture value. We assert that such innovation and a fair profit can come from helping solve the world’s challenges. This is consistent with Peter Drucker’s that, “Every single social and global issue is a business opportunity in disguise… just waiting for entrepreneurial innovation, purpose and management.”
Businesses are doing just that by Co-Creating Mutual Value – an approach that delivers fair profit to shareholders, flourishing workplaces for employees, and solutions to the challenges described in the UN Global Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). Research at the Weatherhead School of Management (CWRU) shows that “Corporations such as Unilever, Danone, Westpac, Grameen Bank, Nedbank, and Greystone Bakeries have turned theory into reality with base-of-the pyramid innovation and social business strategies demonstrating how the enterprising spirit can eradicate human poverty and inequality through inclusive prosperity, profit, and dignified work.” (The Business of Building a Better World, David Cooperrider and Audrey Selian, 2022, Berrett-Koehler Publishers.) It’s all about businesses prospering BY applying their strengths (and those of their ecosystem stakeholders) to our greatest challenges.
Right now this shift in the role of business is only a trickle compared to the enormous potential of the private sector to build a better world. When this trickle becomes a stream and then a river, we will have firmly placed profit generation from social innovation (via collaborative business innovation) into the mosaic of business. In that mosaic, foundations will continue to contribute, but the world will not be as dependent on them as we are now. More importantly we will have significantly accelerated the pace of building a better world.
What’s The Key?
Our research shows the key to Co-Creating Mutual Value lies in a business discovering the intersection of:
- What the world is calling for (the challenges within the business’s ecosystem that most need solutions)
- What the business WANTS to do (the challenges that best fit how the business sees its contribution to society)
- What the business and its ecosystem partners CAN do (the combination of strengths, resources, and capabilities that could be applied successfully)
To enable business to do well BY doing good, our non-profit research organization studies the best examples of co-creating mutual value and then develops practical tools and practices that businesses can use together with their ecosystem stakeholders:
- To find new business opportunities, related to UN Global Goals
- To jointly define what mutual value looks like, and
- To collaborate in creating it.
That is our contribution – but it is insufficient. Thus, we invite your foundation, and you personally, to consider the possibilities raised by the entire business sector engaged in building a better world – not as an add-on to normal operations, but as a core business strategy. Then we will have elevated the role of philanthropy from solving ESG challenges one at a time to creating massive positive change. Businesses that lead in this approach will not only be doing the right thing, they will also be rewarded by investors, employees, and customers.
Our ask is simple. Help us help business see that building a better world by directly addressing our social, economic and environmental challenges is both the right thing to do and because it generates profitability. Will you help lead this transformation?”
Discover more at https://www.cocreatingmutualvalue.org