This case explores the challenges and opportunities of practicing venture philanthropy in an emerging market. Jaff Shen, a serial social entrepreneur and Founder/General Secretary of Leping Social Entrepreneur Foundation ("Leping"), brought the international venture philanthropy network Social Venture Partners ("SVP") to China in 2012 to help build China's overall civil society and proclivity for social entrepreneurship. SVP's Beijing branch, which launched as a non-profit in 2013, made fast progress in attracting partners and investing in multiple mission-driven organizations. SVP Shanghai followed in 2016, registering as a for-profit for greater flexibility of operations, but was making slow progress. Students are asked to explain the reasons for Shanghai's slow growth, and then critically evaluate a strategy suggested to Shen for accelerating the progress. They must take a stand in Shen's internal debate about whether to push a fast top-down strategy or tolerate a slower-paced bottom-up trajectory. Students also have the opportunity to compare four different SPO investment opportunities shortlisted by SVP Shanghai's partners for their initial investment, and to propose an evaluative framework for screening the potential targets and subsequently monitoring the investment outcomes.
This case illustrates the challenges of Peter Wong, CEO of Dow Chemical Greater China, in locally implementing Dow's global sustainability strategy around 2016 when the mainland government has only recently begun to tackle its problems of pollution and corporate responsibility. Dow's 20-year journey to embedding sustainability in global corporate strategy is reviewed in some detail, illustrating the step-by-step process of aligning resources, transforming culture, and building external partnerships to enhance the possibility that sustainability strategies yield financial gains. The case challenges students to make sense of this corporate transformation, and subsequently assess the wisdom of continuing support for commercializing a total dust containment solution when an abrupt drop in the price of coal reduced the solution's financial attractiveness to future purchasers. To make recommendations about further support, students must consider the best ways to measure and interpret a sustainability strategy's impact.