I attended three very different events last week – all of which in some way strengthened my confidence that there’s a real market for shared value supply chains.
The first event was the CUTEC (Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club) Technology Ventures Conference. One of the key speakers was Mike Addison, Global Head of Business Development at P&G speaking on open innovation. You don’t tend to think of P&G as a hugely open company, but he had some strong examples and ended on a plea to all the entrepreneurs in the room to approach P&G and challenge them on how they do everything and help them co-create better products. A call-to-action for co-production between supplier and customer. No explicit reference to social entrepreneurs or social value – but an interesting insight into how even quite traditional businesses are now thinking.
Later that evening I attended Matthew Taylor’s excellent President’s Address at the RSA – Enlightened Enterprise. Matthew focused a great deal on the power of big business as a tool to instigate behaviour change amongst consumers: “by helping us to align our desires, needs and social values, companies can themselves align commercial opportunity with social purpose. By doing so, they can create both deeper customer relationships and new business models.” – and followed with great examples from Nike to Dove. He also referenced ‘downstream’ CSR – how consumers behave after they have purchased a company’s product. Finally, he ended with “If an enlightened company has insights and capacities which can improve the efficiency and sustainability of those in its supply chain, it will see the benefits of sharing that wisdom around. Some of the best and most innovative responsible practices are in the SME and social enterprise sectors; enlightened partnering by larger companies can tap into and enhance this potential.”
The Video is embedded below and I’d recommend anyone to take an hour to watch it. Hopefully it will be RSA Animate-d soon.
Matthew was joined by Ian Cheshire, CEO of Kingfisher (parent organisation of B&Q). Ian seems genuinely to have a sustainability agenda at the core of his beliefs and has worked hard to integrate it through the company. But he admitted that convincing shareholders of the value was much tougher, lamenting that there is nothing in the valuation of a company that reflects its sustainability. “You just can’t discuss life beyond 5 years with investors. I only do it because I think it’s right”. He added that in order to do this we must change pension funds from quarterly reporting to longer term. (Interesting aside – the comment from Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever at a recent conference: “We cannot choose between growth and sustainability – we must have both. If you buy into our approach to long-term value creation… then invest in us, if not… don’t”).
Matthew Taylor ended his talk by saying he sees success as an end to the use of CSR as phrase – as it suggests it’s not a mainstream and inherent part of business. I couldn’t agree more.
Finally on Friday I attended UnLtd’s Social Futures event: a coming together of social entrepreneurs, UnLtd staff & trustees, civil servants, private sector staff and some of our partners to help co-produce some of our new products (insightly written up by the ever-insightful Nick Temple here). One key piece of research, commissioned by UnLtd and delivered by Sidekick Studios, showed that for our Award Winners the most important step along their journey was finding the first big customer. It was also the number one request for support they didn’t feel UnLtd currently offered. I took the opportunity to lead one of the break-out groups tasked with developing products that UnLtd might launch to target this problem. It was a rapid exercise, resulting in a poster and 2 minute presentation – but we developed a concept of brokerage: UnLtd providing a consultancy service to big businesses (understanding their supply chain needs) and then scouting, filtering and connecting relevant social businesses to them. Richard Tyrie of Good People was in the team and he is obviously very interested in this area. His research suggested a £150bn market for the Social Value bill alone. And he had strong examples of other areas where consumer-facing companies make financial benefits from social value creation including Tesco’s mobile phone recycling initiative that saw huge growth in sales of new phones for Tescos – great shared value through what Matthew Taylor would call downstream CSR. The 9 pitches went to the public vote and ours won (positive comments ranged from ‘this is bringing CSR into the mainstream…’ to ‘this is bringing social entrepreneurs into the mainstream!’). Sadly no big money prizes – but a good indication there is support from varied stakeholders for the initiative.
One of the other key findings of the UnLtd research was that there’s a commitment gate that entrepreneurs pass-through. Confidence is needed to get through each gate. I feel these three events mean I’ve past through one commitment gate. This blog is now live…
Shared Value Supply Chains 