Creating Social Value: A Guide for Leaders and Change Makers

* The first textbook to focus on social value creation
* Includes case studies on new types of leaders who can drive both social value creation and financial profits simultaneously
* Introduces a new lexicon for creating social value in organizations
* A distillation of key work from Babson College’s Social Innovation Lab

Social value creation is a journey and each company charts its own path through uncertain and complex terrain. The entrepreneurial leaders profiled in this book are trail-blazers in this new business landscape using both strategy and innovation to generate profits and social value simultaneously.

Creating Social Value focuses on the motivations and preoccupations of entrepreneurial leaders as they look to activate change within their companies, in their sectors, value chains and even through co-creating partnerships with their competitors. Such change requires fundamentally new styles of leadership and business design where companies seek to be generative rather than extractive.

This book is also the story of the emergence of new language. As the authors worked with social entre- and intrapreneurs, they began to hear the building blocks of a new lexicon with the power to inspire and positively influence the culture of an organization. Many of the leaders included in this book have driven change by harnessing the power of language to transform the direction their company is taking.

For example, Campbell’s have created destination goals to describe the long-term vision of the company to nourish its customers, employees and neighbors. Roshan has worked on nation building, creating physical infrastructure in Afghanistan, a country decimated by war. UPS has worked to understand its impact on the planet, and Ford is working with Toyota to co-create technologies to combat climate change.

This book sets out a manifesto for Social Value Creation, defining it as a strategy that combines a unique set of corporate assets (including innovation capacities, marketing skills, managerial acumen, employee engagement, scale) in collaboration with the assets of other sectors and firms to co-create breakthrough solutions to complex economic, social and environmental issues that impact the sustainability of both business and society.