'Social business innovation': how to mix social good with business value

I recently had a chat with strategy execution expert Jeroen Flander about the ‘shared value’ trend. I wasn’t aware of this labeling yet, but the concept comes close to what is commonly called ‘corporate citizenship’, or ‘ethical businesses’.

Anyhow, the discussion gave me the idea to try to map the various reasons companies might have to take shared value seriously. Surely, some are driven by the demand of society, while others do so from free will. Secondly, some do so even if it doesn’t affect their core business, while others do so just because it affects their core business.

This leads to following intriguing segmentation:

• Bottom left (Must do’s) sums the activities companies increasingly are required to do, either through regulations or through pressure from public opinion and stakeholders.
• Bottom right (Nice to do’s) is a crowded area, where many companies (if not all) do philanthropic work mostly for the sake of their brand’s reputation.
• The top right (threat area) shows some examples of companies that didn’t pay sufficient attention to shared values. Clearly it’s in the best interest of all businesses to keep clear of that area.
• But the most interesting spot to be in is the top right one (Opportunity area). Of course, you’d have the social entrepreneurs in there, whose business model is based on ‘doing good’. But there are a couple of ‘classic’ companies who succeed in applying their core competencies to increase their social relevance, and using this social relevance to increase business success.

This will increasingly become the hot spot for companies to be in., where true social value is created while increasing business success. Since innovation is a buzzword nowadays, we could perhaps call this ‘social business innovation’?