Despite an uptick in socially-responsible behaviour by corporations in recent years, irresponsible employment practices remain all too common. Workers have been enslaved (by Nestle's seafood suppliers in Thailand) and subjected to compulsory political and religious indoctrination (by suppliers to Adidas, H&M and Nike in China). The authors share their research findings, which cast doubt on the ability of monitoring alone to compel suppliers in emerging markets to change their practices. What is needed, they argue, is a new brand of entrepreneur: the institutional entrepreneur. Emerging-market manufacturers and the corporations that buy from them must join forces to meet the challenge of eliminating low-road employment practices.
Goal-based mission and vision statements have been around for decades and are widely accepted as a required practice for corporations. But as the post-pandemic economy takes shape, that definition of purpose has expanded significantly. The author argues that duty-based purpose - anchored in explicit values -has become critical for organizations to thrive. She describes the three pillars of duty-based purpose: values, social service and stewardship, providing rich examples. She then explains how to marry the goal and duty-based aspects of an organization's purpose. In a world where viruses can paralyze economies, climate change ravages communities, and the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, she makes it clear that this expanded conception of purpose must become a foundational aspect of every organization.
Open innovation includes external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes. Open innovation has to date been driven largely by business objectives, but the imperative of social challenges has turned attention to the broader set of goals to which open innovation is relevant. This introduction discusses how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges - as well as the trade-offs and tensions that arise as a result. Against this background we introduce the articles published in this Special Section, which were originally presented at the sixth Annual World Open Innovation Conference.
As businesses navigate the reopening of the economy during a global pandemic, a lot will be different. Many executives have expressed a desire to 'do the right thing'. But what is the right thing? The authors argue that the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals can serve as guidelines. The 17 'SDGs' range from affordable and clean energy to climate action to partnerships to achieve the goals. One thing is certain, they say: Leading a company after COVID will require dealing sensitively with the pain, loss and financial consequences of the pandemic for stakeholders across the board.
Embracing a transformative goal is one way to move a legacy business from the brink of disruption to a new business model that incorporates new ideas and technologies. The author defines such a 'moonshot' strategy, named after President John F. Kennedy's 1962 speech announcing that the U.S. would seek to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of the decade. She provides a framework for developing such a lofty goal and shows that you don't have to travel to the moon to experience the moonshot effect: In the end, a moonshot is not defined by its distance from Earth, but by its distance from business as usual.
If your company is considering entering a new global market, why not target a wide range of consumers-from the wealthy, to the middle class all the way down to the poorest of the poor? The authors show how a wide range of for-profit healthcare organizations are experimenting with different types of smartphone-enabled services for low-income consumers. They provide several examples of how these business models work, and describe three approaches that for-profit organizations can use to serve the poor-in the realm of healthcare and beyond.
One of the iconic developments of the 21st century is the growth of cities: by 2050, the number of citizens living in urban areas is expected to exceed 75 per cent-up from 53 per cent today. The implications are varied, and the authors look at them through a health lens. They describe five key aspects of urban life that must be carefully considered if people are to thrive in the world's cities. These include 'the primary education of girls' and 'commercial innovation capacity'. They then describe the ISO-approved framework developed by the World Council on City Data, which one of the authors heads up, which ranks the world's cities on a number of key elements of overall population health-including issues around water and sanitation and environmental safety. Going forward, they argue, this framework will allow for comparisons between the world's cities-and targeted responses.
The complex problems of our time increasingly demand creative, adaptive and flexible governance structures. The author shows that a new breed of 'temporary' organization is emerging to tackle some of the world's most wicked problems, achieve targeted results, then shut down. She provides examples, including an initiative to combat AIDS that involves The Gates Foundation, Merck Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline and UNITAID. She then describes five key characteristics of the new mindset required to build short-term organizations with long-term impact.
For generations, the model for receiving health care services in the developed world has been straightforward. It starts with showing your insurance card at the reception desk and ends with a 10-minute examination/discussion with a doctor. In developing countries, this model is structurally untenable: according to the World Health Organization, there is a global shortage of four million health care providers, and in 57 countries, this amounts to a crisis. The authors present several new models for delivering health care services in developing countries that use ICT (information and communication technologies)-i.e., cell phones, tablets and computers. It is only a matter of time, they say, before these models spread to more resource-rich settings.
'Big data' is everywhere. Organizations of all types - large companies, entrepreneurial organizations, governmental agencies and NGOs - have been encouraged to embrace the detailed, micro-level data generated by digital devices to become more efficient. The author describes the eight big data tools that can make up a big data strategy, including open innovation platforms and calls to action, and shows how each presents a specific challenge to organizations.
The Occupy movement that targeted Wall Street, Bay Street and other financial centers in the fall of 2011 was indicative of how a growing percentage of the population feels about business. And there's no end in sight, says the author, who has taught at leading business schools for her entire career: it seems like every time you turn on the news, there's a new investing or management scandal. Many people lay the blame for these kinds of failures at the feet of MBAs and the business schools that train them - and for good reason, she says. She presents three critical steps that business schools must take in order to transform their culture, and in doing so, transform the culture of business.
USAP faces extraordinary opportunities to change the way that automobiles are serviced in the US by selling parts at fair prices though online channels.
The 2.6 billion global citizens living on less than $2 a day face considerable barriers to effective healthcare, including limited health insurance, low health literacy, and residence in slums or remote areas that are frequently underserved. The authors describe how some highly innovative private healthcare companies have considered these barriers in the design of their products or services. They show that organizations such as India's Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital achieve their innovations by addressing three functional areas concurrently: marketing, finance and operations. They describe the four shared characteristics of these business models and show how these 'innovative exemplars' can inspire innovation across industries.
Although precise numbers are difficult to obtain, the United Nations reports that 2.5 million people are trafficked each year. Approximately 80 per cent of victims are women and girls, with most engaged in the sex trade. The authors, members of the Massachusetts General Hospital Initiative to End Slavery, conducted research in eight metropolitan areas: New York City, Los Angeles, London, Manila, Mumbai, Kolkata (India), Rio de Janeiro and Salvador (Brazil), interviewing hundreds of health workers and anti-trafficking leaders. Based on their research, they make four recommendations for global businesses, who they encourage to exercise leadership in the effort to eradicate human trafficking.
Make no mistake, the end of oil is on the horizon, and with it come significant implications for business and opportunities for the redesign of industry. The forthcoming end of petroleum-derived oil will fundamentally change the course of business on the scale of the Internet, the credit crisis, and perhaps even climate change. Three sets of ideas, explored here, play an important role: finding substitutes for oil; collaborative innovation between industries and sectors; and facing the fundamental socio-political implications of moving away from petroleum.
It's fairly obvious: To make intelligent investments within your organization, you need to understand how your whole industry is changing. But such knowledge is not always easy to come by. Companies misread clues and arrive at false conclusions all the time. To understand truly where your industry is headed, you have to take a long-term, high-level look at the context in which you do business, says Boston University professor Anita McGahan. She studied a variety of businesses from a cross section of industries over a 10-year period, examining how industry structure affects business profitability and investor returns. Her research suggests that industries evolve along one of four distinct trajectories--radical, progressive, creative, and intermediating--that set boundaries on what will generate profits in a business. These four trajectories are defined by two types of threats. The first is when new, outside alternatives threaten to weaken or make obsolete core activities that have historically generated profits for an industry. The second is when an industry's core assets--its resources, knowledge, and brand capital--fail to generate value as they once did. Industries undergo radical change when core assets and core activities are both threatened with obsolescence; they experience progressive change when neither is jeopardized. Creative change occurs when core assets are under threat but core activities are stable, and intermediating change happens when core activities are threatened while core assets retain their capacity to create value. If your company's innovation strategy is not aligned with your industry's change trajectory, your plan for achieving returns on invested capital cannot succeed, McGahan says. But if you understand which path you're on, you can determine which strategies will succeed and which will backfire.