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Three years ago, I attended the first “Shared Value Summit,” a small gathering in Boston with Professor Porter and the firm FSG, to discuss the concept and begin the conversation of what it would take to meaningfully move from theory to practice. At the time, there was a heated debate in CSR circles around whether this concept really was new—whether it was as different from corporate social responsibility (CSR) as Porter and Kramer were claiming it was. The truth was that while there were some companies already moving down this path—companies that were already approaching CSR more as a business strategy than pure philanthropy—many others were still viewing CSR as primarily philanthropy and not integrated at all across their businesses.
One of the main takeaways of the summit was that as companies move into the implementation phase of shared value, it will be important for companies to share best practices, challenges, and case studies to advance learning. To this end, Intel just finished up two new case studies on shared value—including one on our Intel Education Service Corps and another on our Code for Good program. There was a call to action for participants to sign up to participate in the Shared Value Initiative online community, and document and share their learnings.
As evidenced by the conversations last week, the concept of shared value is gaining the attention of more and more companies and stakeholders. Porter relayed that in the relatively short amount of time since he and Mark Kramer published the paper “Creating Shared Value: Redefining Capitalism and the Role of the Corporation in Society,” it has become the third most downloaded article after those first two strategy articles. But perhaps the most promising signal according to Porter is the shift he is seeing daily in the responses of his business school students who increasingly are saying that they want to do more with their careers than just “maximize shareholder value.” As Porter argued in "What is Strategy?", strategy was about the "creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities" to create sustainable competitive advantage. For the business leaders of tomorrow—perhaps when they think about “What is Strategy?” they will be looking at how they can differentiate themselves in a new way—to understand where they can uniquely contribute to solving global social challenges in order to maximize not only shareholder value, but also shared value.
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