The concept of business ‘advantage’ is shifting. Business leaders must increasingly navigate decisions at the nexus of profit, social good and long-term resilience. This is admittedly complex, and hats off to those corporate leaders showing the way.
The solution for your business may be coming from a lesser-known source: social entrepreneurs. The corporate sector can learn from a common social innovation strategy: activating stakeholders as full contributors. Companies can have an advantage by activating their stakeholders with the confidence, knowledge and tools to contribute to a better future.
Supporting people as full contributors is not only the ‘charitable’ job of grantmaking and philanthropy. It’s the responsibility of business – and an opportunity too. Adopting a full contributor strategy can change how a firm creates value, engages and develops its people and organizes and governs to fulfill its mission.
Below are three ways to do it. These strategies come from insights gathered across Ashoka’s global network of 4,000 social entrepreneurs, by studying organizations that are frontrunners in sustainability efforts, and through partnering with dozens of companies embedding positive impact into core business.
1. Give your customers a mission-driven call to action
If a corporate mission is done well – that is, if it is more than a slogan – it becomes a powerful north star to guide your firm’s value creation activities. An authentic mission plays another role – it can inspire people to contribute to social good.
Activating the full potential of your customers requires shifting the script and expanding the fundamental definition. A customer can choose to buy more, buy less and, increasingly, buy into the sustainability mission. However, there’s another way to look at it. When we see and treat our end users as ‘contributors’ to a higher purpose, this suddenly opens an exciting realm of mission-related products, services and behaviors.
Patagonia – as United States-based outdoor apparel company – activates its customers to protect the planet:
• A geo-localized ‘take action’ button on Patagonia’s website allows anyone to enter a zip code and find a range of local climate activities: events, petitions, volunteering and donation suggestions.
• In addition, through its magazine and films, Patagonia educates consumers about climate change and tells the everyday stories of people contributing to solutions.
• Patagonia also makes it easy for its customers to contribute to a healthy planet through its apparel resale site, plus in-store and online repair services and tutorials.
By encouraging prosocial behavior, companies can extend an additional value to consumers – a feeling of meaning. This is particularly relevant at a time when people desire greater influence and control over how they address societal challenges.
2. Create an enabling environment for employees to contribute to positive impact
Companies have another critical asset to drive sustainability efforts – their employees. Activate them.
Employees with creative solutions for positive impact can be found everywhere – across all levels, functions and markets – but they require an enabling environment to initiate and embed solutions into core business.
Kersia, a leading global expert in food safety with headquarters in France, is investing in a workforce that can navigate uncertainty and rapid change, especially as parts of the world face serious food safety challenges.
Employees with creative solutions for positive impact can be found everywhere.
With Ashoka, the company is training a critical mass of employee ‘ambassadors’ globally. Along with their peers, employees engage with social entrepreneurs, learn about systems-change and social innovation approaches, and access a sandbox arena to launch and test new ideas for a sustainable food industry.
For example, Jesús Urdangarin, an Industrial Director, is scaling a water reuse program he began two years ago in Kersia Ibérica’s factories.
Like Urdangarin, based on post-training surveys, 60 percent of participants say they are taking positive actions (internally or externally) that they would not have otherwise taken.
To create an enabling environment for changemaking, Kersia has adopted company wide skills such as empathy, creative problem-solving and collaborative teamwork. Employees can self-assess these skills via the Changemaker Index tool developed by Ashoka, and track them through the company’s performance management cycle.
3. Build and lead fluid and radically open ecosystems
Just as customers and employees can be seen as full contributors, so can other stakeholders, including historically underrepresented or overlooked groups in supply chains and communities.
In the case of Tony’s Chocolonely, a Netherlands-based chocolate company, changing the cocoa industry to end child and illegal labor meant reinventing the relationship with local farming co-operatives and engaging them as an essential part of the solution.
One of Tony’s Chocolonely’s first steps was to help the managers of farming co-operatives realize they were part of a connected, global supply chain. These managers were invited to agree on annual planned production volumes for cocoa and onboarded to a shared digital platform to track bean shipments and deliveries. For the first time, local co-operatives in Western Africa were being asked for their input by a global cocoa buyer.
By eliminating anonymity, changing power structures and collaborating with industry peers – even competitors – Tony’s Chocolonely is considered an industry pioneer shaping a resilient and equitable cocoa industry.
If done well, a full contributor strategy will lead to new value creation.
Another organization using a full contributor strategy is Grupo Globo, the largest communications conglomerate in Latin America. Grupo Globo understands that remaining relevant in a fast-changing media industry requires giving young people voice in an adult-dominant society.
This media conglomerate highlights the stories of young people leading change in their schools and communities via video streaming, TV and public festivals. They invite young people to discuss how media can drive innovation in education and more effectively portray topics that significantly affect youth, such as mental health and climate change. The new societal narrative is that young people can lead powerful change.
Working across your ecosystem with uncommon stakeholders requires adopting new ways of working – openness to some level of risk, self-managing teams, new decision-making processes and radical transparency. While new ways of working can be uncomfortable, the potential impact is huge – new industry practices and changes in societal narratives, which one company could never bring about alone.
Driving societal change, much faster
Many of us feel the pace of sustainable change for the planet is too slow, too siloed and too unhopeful. One answer is exponentially increasing the number of individuals contributing solutions for positive impact.
A full contributor strategy represents a new frontier for business to survive and adapt by putting stakeholders – employees, customers, supply chain actors and communities – at the service of social good.
This involves equipping stakeholders with the knowledge, resources and pathways to contribute. If done well, a full contributor strategy will lead to new value creation, increased stakeholder engagement, improved market resilience and, ultimately, more and better solutions for social and environmental impact.
