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Mapping the landscape of creating social good

Although Salzburg Global Seminar likes to do things a little differently to most convening spaces – bringing together “all of the pieces of the jigsaw” to solve “globally interactive problems” creatively, as Program Director for Gender and Philanthropy, Nancy Smith explained in her opening remarks – most of the participants of the seminar ‘Value vs. Profit: Recalculating the Return on Investment in Financial and Social Terms’ probably weren’t expecting to be quite so creative in the very first session.

Eschewing the usual approach of opening a seminar by giving a lecture, Smith decided instead to draw a map – a map of the landscape of producing “social good” and addressing social challenges.

The two sectors of business and non-profit, non-governmental organizations are like two lands – Bizworld and NGOlandia – separated by a seemingly impassable mountain range, Smith explained.  The mountains are starting to give way smaller hills and in the lower plains, small “hybrid” settlements are starting to spring up, such as ‘benefit corporations’ – businesses required by law to create general benefit for society as well as for shareholders.  In these two lands, they speak a similar language, using terms like ‘value’, ‘profit’, ‘investment’ and ‘return on investment’ – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the two lands fully understand each other.

(Another map was drawn by one group of Fellows depicting the two lands as islands, with the rough yet fertile isle of NGOlandia in the process of building a bridge to the heavily built up but increasingly resource-scarce Bizworld preferring the less permanent crossing of an airplane.)

Despite the wry smiles and chuckles in Parker Hall, the visual (and in some cases even aural) metaphors proved a serious point – these two sectors are often acting separately and their differences need to be bridged if society’s “wicked problems” are to be tackled effectively.

Over the course of the three days at Schloss Leopoldskron, Fellows will reconsider this landscape, to look at how business can work together with non-profits to create social good, whilst still satisfying their business needs – the creation of “shared value”.

Shared value goes beyond traditional ideas of corporate social responsibility – which has long meant businesses “earning money over here in Bizworld and giving it away over there in NGOlandia,” as one Fellow articulated. As explained by the prominent sector publication, the Stanford Social Innovation Review,“shared value is created when companies generate economic value for themselves [profit] in a way that simultaneously produces value for society by addressing social and environmental challenges. Companies can create shared value in three distinct ways: by reconceiving products and markets, redefining productivity in the value chain, and building supportive industry clusters at the company’s locations.”

From Saturday, October 13 to Tuesday, October 17, 42 Fellows from 16 countries, led by speakers from organizations including Nestlé SA, Western Union Company, UBS, FSG, PHINEO, the F.B. Heron Foundation, and Preventable Surprises, will consider their own visions of this landscape, looking at how best to use business as a driver of social good, improve the social sector business, harness the power of investors and better develop policy tools and other mechanisms to identify the most important “levers and actions” for change and deal with these acute societal needs and wicked problems.

By her own admission, Smith’s map of the shared value landscape is far from perfect; ‘where do governments, the “bottom of the pyramid” – the 4 billion people who live on less than $2 per day – and society as a whole fit in?’ were just some of the omissions pointed out by Fellows. The main challenge for Fellows in the days to come calls for them redraw their own maps, establish where in the landscape their own organization is located and eventually better navigate this changing environment.