VOR8 is a new, industry disruptive, social platform that supports ‘for profit’ companies that pursue projects with social benefit while supporting revenue models that generate sustainable profit streams, thereby increasing social benefits worldwide while increasing shareholder values and market capitalizations on a micro-economic corporate level.
Businesses come in all shapes, sizes, and strategies. There are some that focus purely on financial profit, at whatever cost. Fortunately, many businesses have learned that doing good for society and making money do not need to stand diametrically opposite one another, and have found a happy medium of doing both, often through the establishment of corporate social responsibility initiatives, philanthropic foundations, and community outreach programs.
Of these companies, an even smaller subset define their corporate strategy around the belief that doing good for society will actually help them make more money. It is these latter companies that are part of the new corporate strategy space known as shared value.
The idea of shared value strategy took root in a 2011 HBR article entitled “Creating Shared Value: Redefining Capitalism and the Role of the Corporation in Society” by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, professors at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government, respectively. In it, Kramer and Porter argue that the next “wave” of capitalism and global economic growth will rest upon improving the interdependency between a business’ competitiveness and the health of the society/community it operates in.
In fact, with the emergence of Generation Z and a millennial workforce and customer base, corporations are finding an urgent need to redefine the customer, employee, and stakeholder relationship and to leverage the growing desire by a hyper-aware generation to work for, buy products from, and identify with organizations that do good. Some of the world’s top companies are integrating shared value strategy as a competitive edge in an increasingly globalized, automated, and transparent business landscape:
- Shared Value as Product Strategy: Since 2005, General Electric has invested over $20 billion in its Ecomagination™ product portfolio, allowing the company to generate over $160 billion in revenue from operationally green and energy-efficient products, reduce global consumer carbon footprint, and create a variety of branding opportunities. The program has become a core pipeline of product revenue and innovation.
- Shared Value as Customer and Talent Acquisition Channel: As the competition for a limited tech-oriented customer and workforce base increases, Cisco has utilized education as the primary marketing and recruiting channel for customer and talent acquisition, investing $223 million for its Networking Academy and Cisco certification programs to university and high school students. The students of the program today, eventually, become the customers and employees of Cisco tomorrow.
- Shared Value as Market Entry: Novartis’ 2014 initiative to hire community health educators and a rural distribution network for up to 50,000 Indian villages helped launch their pharmaceutical products into a previous inaccessible customer segment, establishing a competitive footprint and earning market share in a vast, untapped Indian rural market.
Indeed, the logic of shared value strategy rests into its name: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The future of the 21st economy may very well rest upon companies that find and exploit the intersection of doing good and doing “well”.
