I find the most innovative are relatively small companies who are nimble enough to flow with a changing system. One food market in Montreal has begun sharing unsold food with small local groups that run coperatives and soup kitchens throughout the local community. This builds great networks and begins to bring supply chains to small communities as provinicial farmers get to know urban neighbourhoods.
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Value Chains/Supply Chains
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SAP has an initiative called 5 & 5 by ’25, targeting five percent of addressable spending with social enterprises and diverse businesses by 2025. In setting this target, SAP aims to inspire organizations around the world to buy more goods and services from purposeful suppliers, making a positive collective impact on the societies they operate in. This also will help make supply chains more resilient.
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Unilever is another example. They know that they need to get plastic out of their supply chain, but no big brand has figured this out yet. They funded the TRANSFORM fund, and also entered into a partnership with MovingWorlds and others via the TRANSFORM Support Hub, to build the capacity of social enterprises so that they can eliminate waste from value chains.
- EY knows that its employees need to develop skills to succeed in a sustainability-minded world. They actively invest in giving their employees experiences to volunteer with social enterprises and also expose them to educational programming - in partnership with social enterprises like us at MovingWorlds - to improve their own internal operations.
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Scaling sustainability innovation practices and overcoming challenges requires a multi-faceted approach that involves various stakeholders.
One of the most exciting approaches is advocating for supportive policies and regulations: Engaging with policymakers and advocating for supportive policies and regulations can create an enabling environment for scaling sustainability innovation practices. This may involve advocating for incentives, subsidies, tax breaks, or regulatory frameworks that promote sustainability practices and remove barriers to scaling.
IBM has also adopted social innovation and established the IBM Corporate Service Corps, a skills-based volunteerism initiative that also influences its talent and professional development strategies. It deploys 500 young leaders a year on team assignments in more than 30 countries in the developing world. Employees engage in two months of training while working full time, spend one month on the ground in a team tackling a social issue, and then mentor the next group for two months. Stanley Litlow told the Havard Business Review that it was more than a philanthropic gesture. He sees it as a talent development system. As he put it, “If participation in these programs increases our retention rate, recruits top talent, and builds skills in our workforce, then it’s addressing the critical issue of competitiveness.”
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Reckitt has launched the “Fight for Access” Accelerator to improve access to healthcare. The project aims to help accelerate and scale social enterprises across at least 7 countries, to improve healthcare for 1.5m people in year 1 alone.
Thats a good point about their adaptability - I wonder in what ways larger businesses or chains could incorporate that same awareness and flexibility. Perhaps that can be a profession in itself.
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On the second question on examples
1.MIDCO a regional internet cable tv provider ,they give each team member a stipend that they use to support a non profit of their choice
2.standard charted partnered with organisation to achieve this
3.unilver have a 10yrs commitment to reduce businesses that impact environment negatively
4.puma
5.m&s
Cutting waste savings and animal welfare
I am a fan of talent-volunteering - supporting the management of social projects and organizations! We built a program at Nova SBE where talent from the privated sector has a 3day program and later is matched with social organizations. We support also the social organizations in creating the right advisory boards, including these executives, for their challenges. More here: https://www.novasbe.unl.pt/en/about-us/projects-for-a-better-future/social-equity-initiative/social-leadership
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Here’s a great blog post from the MovingWorlds CEO highlighting examples of Corporations partnering with Social Enterprises across 10 business functions.
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That’s amazing, Joana! I’d love to learn more about the initiative.
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That is a great initiative would love to know more about it Joana
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*** Our third question of the day:
Q3. How can we work better together to encourage and support social innovation in businesses? ***
Few examples specific to France-based
- Veja: sustainable footwear using organic and fair trade materials, pays fair wages to farmers and factory workers, and promotes transparency in its supply chain.
- Danone Communities: An initiative by Danone that invests in social businesses worldwide, aiming to address social issues related to health, nutrition, and access to clean water.
- La Ruche Qui Dit Oui!: An online platform that connects local farmers and producers with consumers, promoting local, sustainable, and organic food and supporting local economies.
- Enercoop: A cooperative energy supplier that offers 100% renewable energy and supports local renewable energy projects, fostering the transition to a more sustainable energy system.
Contribute to the creation of a healthy and enabling wider ecosystem
Just like entrepreneurs need a supportive and enabling environment to thrive within organisations, organisations need a supporting and enabling ecosystem to do the same. Based on my experience when I worked at a healthcare company where I worked to develop and launch the organisation’s first ever micro-health insurance product via an innovative business model, being able to leverage an ecosystem was instrumental. The micro-health insurance model required three different organisations to collaborate and bring together their unique capabilities and skillsets in order to achieve success. Being part of an ecosystem allowed for rapid insights gathering to understand the problem and end-users better, to find like minded organisations that were willing to collaborate, and to move at a faster pace than if we tried to do it alone.
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Getting involved in, and creating and advocating for, groups and communities focused on driving social impact through businesses is critical. As well as sharing success stories and useful insights, finding ways to connect different organisations (businesses, NGOs, academic institutions) and facilitating collaboration and co-creation to jointly pursue opportunities will lead to successful win-win scenarios.
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To encourage and support social innovation in businesses, we need to create an ecosystem that fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, and learning. This involves bringing together stakeholders from different sectors, including business, government, civil society, and academia, to share best practices and develop innovative solutions to social and environmental challenges.
Another important aspect is to provide funding and resources for social innovation initiatives. This can be done through public-private partnerships, grants, and other forms of financing that support social innovation.
Finally, we need to create incentives for businesses to engage in social innovation. This can be done through policies and regulations that reward companies for their social and environmental performance and penalize those that do not. It can also involve creating standards and certification programs that promote sustainable business practices and provide recognition for companies that are making a positive impact on society and the environment.
Encouraging and supporting social innovation in businesses is critical for creating a more sustainable and equitable world. By fostering collaboration, providing resources, and creating incentives, we can create an ecosystem that promotes social innovation and supports businesses in making a positive impact on society and the environment.
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I think that the way to work better together is to agree on our long-term goals, and then center those goals of supporting people and our planet at the heart of all following conversations. At the TRANSFORM Support Hub, we put the social enterprise at the center of every conversation we have with our governmental, impact investor, foundation, and nonprofit partners and it’s amazing how much clarity that makes and how it lets us move more quickly.
Enable a culture of innovation.
Fostering an innovation culture should be given in any company, but it’s more often than not the first barrier to innovation performance. Building an environment that encourages and enables innovation takes time and effort. It’s good to keep in mind that even though a change in the corporate culture starts with the leaders, it is also enforced from the bottom up. Management has to take on the responsibilities of communicating, allocating resources and getting the right people on board.
In addition in standard chartered bank you are given leave days for the volunteering that you engage in
There is also a sustainability project called future markers that focuses on the young people ,gender equality and cutting gaps in accessing bank services
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