CCMV-C Updates

April 25, 2025

Dear Fellow Traveler on the Road of Building a Better World – A World That Works for All

The past year has been challenging. Various non-life threatening but distracting health and other life challenges coincided with the terming-out of Dave Cook (from our Board); Fritz Walters and Chris Reaves (from our Core Team), Beau Daane and Erik Nicholson (from our Advisory Council). Frankly, the progress made in the past year has been slower than hoped for. But there is light over the horizon. Susan Donnan and I are moving forward in some exciting new ways!

What’s NEW at the Co-Creating Mutual Value Collaborative?

In conversations with Board and Advisory Council members, as well as in dialogues with other business advisors, coaches and leaders over the past half year, we became convinced that the language of Co-Creating Mutual Value was not easily understood and somewhat academic in tone.

Consequently, we have reframed our research and development work to focus on what we call Regenerative Business Growth. In the spirit of throwing out only the bath water while keeping the baby, the core ideas of CO-CREATION and MUTUAL VALUE still underpin all our work as we move forward in developing tools and practices for Regenerative Business Growth.

Regenerative Business Growth is deeply rooted in:

  • A recognition that wider, deeper engagement of the business sector in building a better world is necessary if we are to have any hope of achieving a world that works for all.
  • A recognition that all businesses understandably prioritize growth – which is often assumed to be in conflict with the allocation of resources for building a better world.
  • Finally, we recognize from our research that the creative resolution of this tension is results in observable progress towards a world that works for all and prosperity for the enterprise.

Regenerative Business GrowthWith that in mind, and based on our research, we are defining Regenerative Business Growth as any growth that meets EACH and all of the following four criteria

  1. Comes from new services or products, operating improvements in the value chain or innovations in how value is captured;
  2. And, goes beyond doing less harm toward regeneratively revitalizing our social, economic, or ecological systems, in support of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (or other widely accepted ESG frameworks);
  3. And, creates new value for both the enterprise and its traditional stakeholders BY co-creating new value for community stakeholders, the wider economy and the biosphere;
  4. And, uses collaborative processes to combine the strengths and aspirations of the business with those in the ecosystem communities of the enterprise.

This covers growth in any of the business’s customer segments, market share, profitability, or core strategic capabilities.

Drawing on our CxO interviews and our other “exemplar businesses” data set has led to these criteria and the Regenerative Business Growth Roadmap shown at the right.

What’s Happening NOW at the Co-Creating Mutual Value Collaborative?

In support of shifting our focus onto Regenerative Business Growth (while keeping the ideas of co-creating mutual value as core concepts), Susan and Bernard are hard at work at:

  • producing the November 2025 special issue of the International Journal of Appreciative Inquiry. The focus of that special issue is “Regenerative Business: Strengths-Based Practices for Building a Better World”
  • getting ready to draft our playbook “Regenerative Business Growth: How To Prosper by Building a Better World”

Simultaneously, Bernard and our colleague Jodie Goulden:

  • are working to organize a hosted/sponsored network on Regenerative Business
  • and they just collaborated on a webinar for the Organization Design Forum on this topic.

We are also anticipating a May 2025 publication of Bernard’s article called REGENERATIVE BUSINESS GROWTH: Using Ecosystem Strengths to Build a Better World.

NEEDED: 2-3 Additional Advisory Council Members

The role of our Advisory Council is primarily to be our thinking partners. In fact the main task this year for Advisory Council members will be to provide feedback on drafts of our book Regenerative Business Growth: How To Prosper by Building a Better World.

Bearing in mind that our social purpose as a non-profit is:

To help build a world that works for all by providing businesses and their ecosystem partners with examples, evidence-based tools and practices for Regenerative Business Growth.

…we ask our Advisory Council members for two things:

1. To provide guidance on our development of a framework and practice for Regenerative Business Growth – specifically:

a) Guidance on prototypes of concepts, tools and practices for Regenerative Business Growth.
b) Guidance on trends and innovations in the fields of sustainable impact business models, inclusive capitalism, business as a force for good, business ecosystem development and other related areas.
c) Identification of business exemplars which we can study, leqrn from and share with others.
d) Guidance on our research process.

2. To act as our ambassadors to the world – making introductions, promoting our work, and generally representing our interests.

Time Commitments For Advisory Council Members

  • Total requests for time will not exceed 12 hours/year.
  • Participation requests will be composed of:
    ○ Meeting virtually once or twice/year for 2 hours with other Council members
    ○ Responding to email questions or phone calls. We expect these to be no more than one per quarter.

NOTE: Advisory Council members are appointed for as long as they choose to serve.

Desirable Background for Advisory Council Members

  • Experience in consulting, research or leadership in the areas of Sustainability; ESG; CSR; Strategy/Business Devleopment; Impact Business Model Innovation; Inclusive Capitalism; Stakeholder Capitalism etc.
  • Or, experience with qualitative research methods
  • Or, experience with strength-based processes for innovation and change
  • Or, experience with Design and Design Thinking

If you know of any good candidates, or if you are interested, please reach out to us.

Thank you.

Bernard Mohr and Susan Donnan

 

PS: We are a registered 501-c-3, social purpose driven, scientific research non-profit organization. Our operating expenses are currently completely self-funded. All the research and development work we do comes from unpaid contributed time.  If you support our efforts, please consider making a donation. It’s easy, just go to our website www.cocreatingmutualvalue.org and click on the DONATE button at the top of our home page. Thank you.