Читать книгу The Mission-Driven Venture - Lane Marc J. - Страница 13

No matter how good companies' intentions are or how deep their commitment to social responsibility, corporate law in the United States and elsewhere is often understood to require them, first and foremost, to maximize shareholder value. While Professor Porter argues that all businesses should reinvent themselves as social enterprises, the shareholder primacy rule continues to collide with concerns about the ends to which profits are pursued, how they are gained, and where their impact is felt. However socially responsible businesses might want to be, whether by ensuring that their employees are well paid or shrinking their environmental footprint, the results of corporations' socially responsible practices just aren't great enough, at least yet, to solve the formidable social problems we face in America and throughout the world.

Sadly, the same applies to government and traditional non-profits. The work they do is critically important, but the hard truth is that their resources are not up to the challenge: some 842 million people in the world go hungry every night according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, at least 80 percent of the world's population lives on less than $10 per day according to the World Bank, and 783 million people in the world lack access to clean water according to UNESCO. There's much more work to be done, and mission-driven ventures are doing much of the heavy lifting.

Mission-driven ventures in the United States have joined forces in the Social Enterprise Alliance (“SEA”), an organization with sixteen chapters in major American cities that connect mission-driven entrepreneurs, promote their ventures, and advocate for public policy that will help them drive positive social change on a scale as large as the problems they work to solve. Since 2010, SEA has partnered with its sister organizations in other countries to put on the annual Social Enterprise World Forum, which allows mission-driven entrepreneurs from around the world to network and collaborate as they advance social enterprise development internationally.

In academia, centers or programs for the study of mission-driven ventures have been established at some of the world's leading business schools, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, and Berkeley. Oxford's Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship has for several years played host to the annual Skoll World Forum, the world's premier conference for international social enterprise collaboration. More and more MBA students are forgoing high-paying, status-conferring jobs and instead are pursuing careers with mission-driven ventures in order to make a positive difference. Business schools have responded to this shift. According to the Bridgespan Group, the number of social enterprise courses offered by the nation's top MBA programs has more than doubled over the last decade. And members of America's most educated and tech-savvy generation, the Millennials, are founding startup companies that make money by solving social and environmental problems through the use of such tech innovations as crowd-funding and computer application software.

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International, numbering 670 accredited institutions in nearly fifty countries and territories, recently revised the core principles underlying the business curricula it sanctions to encourage an academic commitment to environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility. According to Linda Livingstone, AACSB's vice chair and the dean of the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University, “Early on, this movement was probably very much driven by individuals who had a personal passion. Some of them created their own companies around that passion, whereas others brought it into the companies they were part of. But I think, as it has developed and become more widespread, companies began to realize it can also be good for business and it can be profitable.”

At the same time, many of the most influential members of the private sector have called for the reinvention of capitalism as a force for social good in the 21st century – a sustainable capitalism in which long-term success is inextricably linked with serving a higher social purpose. Jay Coen Gilbert, a co-founder of the successful basketball shoe and apparel company AND1, believes we have reached a turning point in the evolution of capitalism where the 20th century model of maximizing the value of shareholders' investments without regard to the social and environmental impact of companies' business activities is giving way to a 21st century model of companies doing business in a way that creates value for their shareholders, their workers, the communities in which they do business, and the environment. Gilbert and his partners, Andrew Kassoy and Bart Houlihan, are using B Lab, the non-profit organization they founded, to build a nationwide community of certified “B Corps” to make it easier for people “to tell the difference between good companies and good marketing.” Certified B Corps (like Vanessa Bartram's WorkSquare, LLC) are sustainable businesses and for-profit social enterprises that meet B Lab's rigorous standards of social and environmental performance and legal accountability. The chairman and CEO of the British retailer Marks & Spencer, boasting over 1,000 stores in forty countries, issued a warning to companies everywhere that B Lab might echo: if companies fail to adopt sustainable business models, they will become casualties of the combined forces of population growth, diminishing resources, and global climate change.

Governments, both in the United States and abroad, have also begun to see the power of the mission-driven venture. In the United States, the Obama Administration created a White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation within the President's Domestic Policy Council in May of 2009. The Office is tasked with engaging individuals, non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, and government entities to develop community-based solutions to America's social problems. Most notably, it established the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), administered by the Corporation for National and Community Services, which mobilizes public and private resources to find and grow community-based nonprofits with evidence of strong results. SIF makes annual grants ranging between $1 million and $10 million for up to five years to intermediaries that provide technical assistance and funding to innovative social programs in local communities. SIF has already raised more than $350 million in private capital to support more than 200 nonprofit organizations, many of them social enterprises, and it has led the way for similar programs within the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Reflecting the growing national commitment to social enterprise, Rhode Island Congressman David N. Cicilline, joined by eleven co-sponsors from eleven states, introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representative on May 17, 2013, that would create a Social Enterprise Ecosystem and Economic Development Commission. The Commission would identify opportunities for the federal government to engage social enterprises more effectively in creating jobs and strengthening local economies.

In the United States, government has been most encouraging of mission-driven ventures at the state and local levels. A growing number of states, laboratories of innovation, have adopted legislation that authorizes the creation of “Benefit Corporations” – business corporations pursuing a material, positive impact on society and the environment, as measured by a third-party standard. Eight states and two tribal nations have adopted legislation that authorizes the creation of low-profit, limited liability companies (“L3Cs”). The L3C combines the financial advantages and governance flexibility of the traditional limited liability company with the social advantages of a non-profit entity.

Illinois has even created a Task Force on Social Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Enterprise (which the author chairs), whose purpose is to make recommendations to the governor and legislature on how the state can create, scale, and sustain innovative social programs; build the capacity of non-profit organizations and government to pursue entrepreneurial ventures; and attract funding to the state to support these ventures.

New York City stands out among municipalities in its steadfast determination to fund innovation. The NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), the 2011 winner of the Innovations in American Government Award, collaborates with twenty-eight city agencies to launch and scale up more than fifty programs and policy initiatives. CEO, the brainchild of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, not only designs, implements, and measures unique programs intended to combat poverty. It also spurs private-sector investment and fosters a culture of invention and evidence-based decision making throughout city government.

Innovative, private-sector efforts are also grabbing the attention of governments outside the United States. In the United Kingdom, 131 elected officials, including Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democratic Party Leader Nick Clegg, pledged their support for the social enterprise movement by signing a charter published by the Social Enterprise Coalition, a sister organization of the Social Enterprise Alliance in the United States. In addition, the European Commission has established a Social Business Initiative to create an environment favorable to the development of mission-driven ventures in Europe.

The Pay for Success model, piloted in the United Kingdom and Australia as Social Impact Bonds and Social Benefit Bonds, respectively, is a new way of financing social services to help governments target limited funds to achieve a positive, measurable outcome. The approach has been adopted by the U.S. government in separate efforts to reduce recidivism rates and homelessness. A number of U.S. cities, counties, and states are following suit.

This surge of enthusiasm for mission-driven ventures is itself empowering. More and more non-profit organizations, businesses, universities, and governments in the United States and abroad have become believers and dedicate the talent, capital, knowledge, and spirit it takes to help mission-driven ventures realize the enormous potential each of them clearly sees.