Shared Value - Social Enterprise makes it to Harvard

Porter's Five Forces is probably the best known business school framework of them all. Legions of MBA students have learnt to recite it, quote it at every interview opportunity and arrange it prettily on a PowerPoint slide.

Michael Porter has now, however, come up with something much more interesting, the idea that companies should not only create shareholder value (i.e. profits) but also more wider Shared Value, i.e. value shared with a much wider set of stakeholders (including customers, communities, suppliers and so on).

Whilst this idea is, of course, not news to people who know about social enterprise (and Porter even mentions social entrepreneurs in his Harvard Business Review article), it's refreshing to see it is gaining momentum amongst mainstream pillars of the establishment.

Some quotes that particularly liked included:

• We need a more sophisticated form of capitalism, one imbued with a social purpose.
• Not all profit is equal. Profits involving a social purpose represent a higher form of capitalism.
• Because they are not locked into narrow traditional business thinking, social entrepreneurs are often well ahead of established corporations in discovering these opportunities.
• Shared value focuses companies on the right kind of profits—profits that create societal benefits rather than diminish them.