#socialimpactinvesting | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

creativesage · 7 years ago

Photo

(via The Next Phase of Business Sustainability | Stanford Social Innovation Review)

The era of corporations integrating sustainable practices is being surpassed by a new age of corporations actively transforming the market to make it more sustainable.

By Andrew J. Hoffman — Spring 2018

Business sustainability has come a long way. From the dawn of the modern environmental movement and the establishment of environmental regulations in the 1970s, it has become a strategic concern driven by market forces. Today, more than 90 percent of CEOs state that sustainability is important to their company’s success, and companies develop sustainability strategies, market sustainable products and services, create positions such as chief sustainability officer, and publish sustainability reports for consumers, investors, activists, and the public at large.

This trend will not abate anytime soon. Surveys show that 88 percent of business school students think that learning about social and environmental issues in business is a priority, and 67 percent want to incorporate environmental sustainability into their future jobs. To meet this demand, the percentage of business schools that require students to take a course dedicated to business and society increased from 34 percent in 2001 to 79 percent in 2011, and specific academic programs on business sustainability can now be found in 46 percent of the top 100 US master of business administration (MBA) programs.

For all this interest, we should expect the world to become more sustainable. But problems such as climate change, water scarcity, species extinction, and many others continue to worsen. Sustainable business is reaching the limits of what it can accomplish in its present form. It is slowing the velocity at which we are approaching a crisis, but we are not changing course. Instead of tinkering around the edges of the market with new products and services, business must now transform it. That is the focus of the next phase of business sustainability, and we can see signs that it is emerging.

The first phase of business sustainability, what we at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute call “enterprise integration,” is founded on a model of business responding to market shifts to increase competitive positioning by integrating sustainability into preexisting business considerations. By contrast, the next phase of business sustainability, what we call “market transformation,” is founded on a model of business transforming the market. Instead of waiting for a market shift to create incentives for sustainable practices, companies are creating those shifts to enable new forms of business sustainability.

Enterprise integration is geared toward present-day measures of success; market transformation will help companies create tomorrow’s measures. The first is focused on reducing unsustainability; the second is focused on creating sustainability.1 The first attends to symptoms; the second attends to causes. The first focuses primarily inward toward the health and vitality of the organization; the second expands that focus to look outward toward the health and vitality of the market and society in which the organization operates. The first will help future leaders get a job in today’s marketplace; the second will help them develop a target for a lifelong career. The first is incremental, the second transformational.

Changing the way we do business is essential to addressing the challenges of environmental degradation. The market is the most powerful institution on earth, and business is the most powerful entity within it. Business transcends national boundaries, and it possesses resources that exceed those of many nation-states. Business is responsible for producing the buildings we live and work in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the automobiles we drive, the energy that propels them, and the next form of mobility that will replace them. This does not mean that only business can generate solutions, but with its unmatched powers of ideation, production, and distribution, business is best positioned to bring the change we need at the scale we need it.

Sustainable Business 1.0: Enterprise Integration

In its first incarnation, business sustainability represents a market shift. Market pressures bring sustainability to business attention through core management channels and functions. This began with Nixon-era government regulation and grew to include insurance companies, investors, consumers, suppliers, buyers, and others through the 1980s and 1990s.2 Such market pressures can emerge from numerous sources: coercive drivers—from domestic and international regulations and the courts; resource drivers—from suppliers, buyers, shareholders, investors, banks, and insurance companies; market drivers—from consumers, trade associations, competitors, and consultants; and social drivers—from nonprofit organizations, activist groups, the press, religious institutions, and academia.3

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one response to such pressures, companies have sought to improve competitive positioning by linking sustainability and corporate strategy. This involves translating the issue into the core language of business management: operational efficiency, capital acquisition, strategic direction, and market growth. In each case, the firm has an established model that it can use to conceptualize the issue and formulate a response. In this way, sustainability becomes much like any other business threat, where market expectations change and technological developments advance, leaving certain industries to adapt or face demise while others rise to fill their place.

For example, when insurance companies apply sustainability pressures on the firm, the issue becomes one of risk management. When competitors apply such pressures, it becomes an issue of strategic direction. When investors and banks do so, it becomes an issue of capital acquisition and cost of capital. When suppliers and buyers do so, it becomes an issue of supply-chain logistics. When consumers do so, it becomes an issue of market demand. Framed in such terms, much of the specific language of sustainability recedes and is replaced by standard business logic. Therefore, companies can remain agnostic about the science of particular issues (such as climate change) but still recognize their importance as business concerns. The successful company can perform this translation process and integrate sustainability into its existing structures and strategies.

Take Whirlpool, for example: It has improved appliance energy efficiency because it has watched energy efficiency move from number 12 in consumer priorities in the 1980s to number three, just behind cost and performance, today. Whirlpool and others expect those concerns to continue to grow.4 One signal of this growth is the LOHAS consumers (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), a segment that considers environmental attributes in purchasing decisions and was estimated to be a $355 billion market in the United States in 2016 and a $546 billion market worldwide.

Another signal comes from impact investors, who consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in their investment criteria. The sector reached $8.72 trillion of professionally managed assets in the United States in 2016, or one-fifth of all investment under professional management. But it is not just a specialized sector; this past May, financial advisory firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street cast votes in opposition to ExxonMobil management and called for the company to disclose its climate change impacts.

These are all signs that the market has shifted and continues to shift. Today, consumers can buy sustainable products, stay in sustainable hotels, eat sustainable foods, and use sustainable cleaning products. While this greening of the market is a good thing, it is not actually solving the root problems it was meant to address. Our world continues to become less, not more, sustainable.

Sustainable Business 2.0: Market Transformation

While business sustainability has been going mainstream, the world has witnessed unprecedented human impacts on the natural environment that threaten the viability of life on Earth. To mark this shift, scientists have proposed that we have left the Holocene and are now entering the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch that acknowledges the enormous influence of the world’s 7.5 billion people (to be nearly 10 billion by 2050) on the planet.5

To measure that influence, they have identified nine “planetary boundaries” that represent “thresholds below which humanity can safely operate and beyond which the stability of planetary-scale systems cannot be relied upon.”6 These are what Lancaster University management professor Gail Whiteman has called the “key performance indicators” (KPIs) of the planet, many of which are not doing so well. While one (ozone depletion) is on the mend, scientists believe we have overshot the boundaries of three: climate change, biodiversity loss, and biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus cycles). Further indicators are also blinking red, such as ocean acidification, freshwater use, and deforestation. The remaining two boundaries—chemical pollution and atmospheric particle pollution—require more data to assess. All of these disruptions are the result of system failures created largely by our market institutions. They will have to be remedied by those institutions.

Fortunately, capitalism can be quite malleable. It is designed by human beings in the service of human beings, and it can evolve to meet the changing needs of human beings. This has happened throughout its history to address issues such as monopoly power, collusion, and price-fixing. Today’s pressing need is sustainability—particularly to address climate change—and legislators are not the only ones who can shift course. Many companies recognize this challenge and are pushing for new market models. In the words of Unilever CEO Paul Polman, “We are entering a very interesting period of history where the responsible business world is running ahead of the politicians” and taking on a broader role to “serve society.”

The next phase of business sustainability calls for a transformation of the market, discarding such outdated notions as treating the environment as a limitless source of materials and sink for waste, seeing economic value as the only measure of nature’s worth, encouraging unbridled consumption, and considering perpetual economic growth as even possible. Corporate decision makers have a key role to play in facilitating this transition. Instead of accepting the rules of the market as given, they must change them to incorporate the planet’s KPIs. For example, to turn around the KPI of climate change, the market must go carbon neutral and eventually go carbon negative. We don’t yet know how to do that, but we know that it cannot be done by one company or one product. It requires a change in the overall market.

Real sustainability is a property of a system.7 For example, the notion of an energy company installing a wind farm and calling itself sustainable makes no empirical sense. A more sustainable energy system incorporates the whole grid, encompassing generation, transmission, distribution, use, and mobility. We can already see signals of this change happening as new energy sources, distributed energy, demand-side management, smart appliances, and smart meters are beginning to transform our conceptions of energy. Already, jobs in the clean energy sector have exceeded those in oil drilling.

But the energy renaissance goes further. Electric vehicles have the potential to change the grid, leveling the electricity demand curve by charging at night and providing storage capacity during the day for intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. Already, a Nissan Leaf automobile owner in Japan can buy a transformer to power the house off the battery pack during a power failure. Research is under way to scale this concept and allow consumers to rent their batteries to utilities while their car is parked. Electric vehicles are also transforming the auto industry. Who could have predicted 20 years ago that new entrants like Tesla would enjoy a larger market capitalization than General Motors?

And as the shift to driverless cars continues, IT companies such as Apple and Alphabet have entered the fray, shifting success factors in the auto sector from hardware to software, and with them our conceptions of personal mobility. For example, as incumbents such as Ford Motor seek to become mobility providers, they must learn to operate like the airline industry, where profits increase when their cars spend minimal time idling. Given that today’s personal car is parked 95 percent of the time, driverless cars can result in fewer cars on the road (at least in urban centers) as people purchase mobility services rather than own cars. Fewer cars on the road means repurposing unneeded roads, parking lots, garages, and service stations.

Systemic Corporate Strategies

As we see with the energy and transportation sectors, the potential scope of market transformation is vast. To help flesh this out, we can conceive this sustainability revolution as proceeding from two initial phases. First, corporations rethink their business strategies to play a stronger role in guiding the sustainability of the systems of which they are a part. Second, the business model itself undergoes reconceptualization. The first phase includes at least four new ways of conceiving their approach to operations, partnerships, government engagement, and transparency.

New conceptions of operations

Market transformation calls for optimizing supply-chain logistics to reduce risks from numerous factors such as disruptions due to increased storm severity caused by climate change; current and future resource availability and price volatility; accelerating emissions and concerns for public health and the environment; and the future resilience of business and civil society. These risks can directly affect assets and operations, availability and costs of inputs, regulation of sourcing and distribution, workforce availability and productivity, and stakeholder reputation. For instance, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Cargill, and General Mills have all faced threats to supply chains due to the decreased availability of water, a once-plentiful resource now scarcer because of climate change and over-consumption.

To better manage such operational systems, companies are moving away from linear models in which items are created, used, and disposed of once they reach their end of serviceable life, and toward circular models, where items are created, used, and then either restored or reprocessed to recover energy or materials that can be used again. One key to this new vision of a circular economy is that it is regenerative by design; it is organized to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times.

For example, industrial and consumer products company Ricoh has concluded that by 2050, there will be an insufficient supply of many reasonably priced raw materials to support its manufacturing needs. As a result, the company is revising its business model using life-cycle analysis as the basis for decision making and establishing a series of what it calls “Resource Smart Solutions” for product design and manufacturing, reuse, collection, maintenance, and materials recovery. To change the system around it, the company is also helping its customers reduce energy use, carbon footprint, and virgin material use while also expanding its own opportunities for product refurbishing, recycling, and new designs. Targets include reducing virgin resource use by 25 percent by 2020 and 87.5 percent by 2050. In adopting circular economy thinking, Ricoh is striving to move beyond incremental efficiency goals to more ambitious “net zero impact” business operations.8

New conceptions of partnerships

Going beyond the supply chain, companies also look to novel partnerships outside standard modes of shifting the market, including nonprofit organizations, the government, competitors, and seemingly unrelated companies.

For example, as Ford increased its research and development in hybrid and electric drivetrains, it saw an opportunity in how customers would live more electrified lifestyles overall. Together with Infineon, SunPower, Whirlpool, and Eaton, Ford developed the MyEnergi Lifestyle program, exploring ways in which hybrid electric vehicles, solar power systems, energy-efficient appliances, and home design can be integrated to reduce the total carbon footprint. Similarly, Toyota Motor is seeking a broad array of partnerships to achieve its goal of going “beyond zero environmental impact” by eventually eliminating CO2 emissions from vehicle operation, manufacturing, materials production, and energy sources by 2050.

New conceptions of government engagement

Very few business schools offer courses on collaborative and constructive lobbying. Indeed, the public perceptions of lobbying are generally negative. But lobbying is basic to democratic politics as governments seek guidance on how to set the rules of the market and usher reforms as needed. Forward-thinking companies are looking for ways to participate constructively in policy formation.

For example, Intel was instrumental in calling attention to the horrors of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While the company could have simply stopped sourcing such conflict minerals from the region, it did not want to create additional hardship for legal mining operations. Instead, it helped create provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act that require the tracking and disclosure of such mineral sourcing within the broader electronics industry.

This is not unusual. Companies are also working with governments to phase out heat-trapping HFC chemicals and setting new efficiency standards on trucks. The Paris Agreement on climate change would not have been possible without the powerful business interests that helped broker a deal. In each of these examples, business took a responsible position in bringing about a sustainable shift in the market through policy.

New conceptions of transparency

The only way that market transformation will be successful is through trust, and trust can be gained only through greater transparency. The expansion of corporate influence in society, particularly as it relates to government, will make some justifiably uneasy. But robust reporting mechanisms can help allay those fears and also help protect companies from the effects of misconduct, including legal liability and penalties. To be sure, companies are already disclosing numerous sustainability indicators through established standards, such as the globally recognized Global Reporting Initiative or Carbon Disclosure Project. But transparency goes further as companies face increasing demands for data, for both internal management and external validation, under the watchful eye of activists, investors, suppliers, buyers, employees, and customers. The gathering and dissemination of such information can open up new awareness of supply-chain risks and opportunities.

For example, IBM and partner companies are experimenting with blockchain technology to transform visibility and traceability in complex, often opaque, global supply chains. In 2017, IBM piloted supplychain blockchain with Walmart to address food safety in its global supply and distribution network and plans to roll it out further with nine global agricultural companies. In another example, Nestlé conducted an internal investigation of its Thai fish supply chains in 2014 and found forced labor and brutal treatment of workers. But in a dramatic shift from standard practices of privacy and nondisclosure, the company posted the report online, imposed new requirements on suppliers, and commissioned outside auditors to assure compliance. This public disclosure compelled other companies that source fish in Thailand to follow suit, shifting the competitive dynamics of supply-chain logistics.

New Ways of Doing Business

Market transformation not only compels more systemic business strategies but also challenges traditional ways of conceiving business itself. It demands new conceptions of corporate purpose, notions of consumption, and models and metrics of business success.

New conceptions of the corporation’s purpose

The dominant idea of the purpose of the corporation as simply to make money for its shareholders took hold within business in the 1970s and 1980s. But the narrow pursuit of shareholder value leads to excessively short time horizons for investment planning and measures of success. It also leads to a focus on only the type of shareholder who is less interested in sustainability efforts and, in the words of Cornell Law School professor Lynn Stout, is “shortsighted, opportunistic, willing to impose external costs, and indifferent to ethics and others’ welfare.”9

New ideas of corporate purpose are beginning to grow within business practice and education. For example, benefit corporations are one type of innovation that seeks to integrate a broader array of objectives than simply profits into its forms of organizing, governance, and legal statement of purpose. And other companies are watching closely, sometime mimicking them. This trend has caught on among MBA students who challenge conventional thinking around capitalism and corporate purpose. At the Harvard Business School, an immensely popular course called “Reexamining Capitalism” explores “the evolution, power, and limitations of our current capitalist systems” and “how the ‘rules of the game’ by which capitalism is structured should change” to address the social and environmental issues of our day.

New conceptions of consumption

Is “sustainable consumption” an oxymoron? The World Business Council for Sustainable Development doesn’t think so, calling on businesses to “abandon the existing consumption paradigm” and move toward “transformations in mainstream lifestyles and consumption patterns.”10 Several businesses and activists have sought to put such an idea into practical use.

For example, Patagonia, through its Common Threads Initiative, encourages people to buy used Patagonia products on eBay before going to the store to buy them new. Adbusters has long promoted its “Buy Nothing Day,” what it calls a “24-hour moratorium on consumer spending” as a counterpoint to the Black Friday spending spree that traditionally follows the holiday of Thanksgiving. The outdoor lifestyle retailer and co-op Recreational Equipment (REI) closes its 149 stores on Black Friday as part of its “#OptOutside” program. In 2016, Subaru, Google, Meetup, Upworthy, and competing outdoor brands such as Burton, Keen, Yeti, and Prana chose to partner with the effort. In the end, resource use must be reduced at the source, and that means developing new models of consumption.

New conceptions of business models and metrics

Market transformation requires a compelling new business model to replace traditional ones that dominate business thinking. For example, neoclassical economics and agency theory employ dismally simplified models of human beings as driven primarily by selfishness, where those running the company (agents) will shirk or even steal from the owner (principal) if they do the work and the owner gets the profits.

But behavioral economists have argued that real humans don’t behave as neoclassical economics suggests we do, and legal scholars argue that managerial motivations are far more complex than a simple principal/agent relationship and instead involve thousands of shareholders, executives, and directors with more socially positive motivations. And new models have arisen, such as positive organizational scholarship and appreciative inquiry, that move beyond standard cynical conceptions of human behavior to understand how and why people are motivated to devote their work toward improving the world around them and learn how to create the organizational conditions that will foster that activity. These models are gaining increasing interest in business teaching, research, and practice as a way to create a more committed and effective organization.

Other models are also beginning to gain recognition. Doughnut economics11 is a model of economic growth that links social justice to efforts to stay within the planetary boundaries of the Anthropocene epoch. Shared value is aimed at redefining capitalism by arguing that the competitiveness of a company is closely tied to the health of the communities in which it is embedded.12 Conscious capitalism is a model of business that serves the interests of all major stakeholders—customers, employees, investors, communities, suppliers, and the environment. And regenerative capitalism reimagines capitalism in terms that are self-organizing, naturally self-maintaining, and highly adaptive to produce lasting social and economic vitality for global civilization as a whole. Each of these models is seeking an amended form of capitalism that is sensitive to the constraints of the Anthropocene.

Closely related to models of business behavior are the metrics used to define success, many of which lead to unsustainable outcomes. For example, discount rates are used to capture the time value of money—the fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. But a common discount rate of 5 percent leads to a conclusion that everything 20 years out and beyond is worthless. When gauging the response to climate change, is that an outcome that anyone—particularly anyone with children or grandchildren—would consider ethical? London School of Economics professor Nicholas Stern answered no with an argument that used an unusually low discount rate when calculating the future costs and benefits of climate change mitigation and adaptation.13

Another problematic metric is gross domestic product (GDP). This measure of national economic health fails to distinguish between financial transactions that add to the well-being of a country and those that diminish it. Any activity in which money changes hands will register as GDP growth, even money spent on recovery from natural disasters and pollution cleanup. To examine alternatives, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy created a commission, headed by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen. Their 2010 report recommended a shift in economic emphasis from the production of goods to a broader measure of overall well-being that would include measures for categories such as health, education, security, and sustainability.14

Reshaping Politics to Reshape the Market

A discussion of market transformation and the corporation’s shifting role in society cannot be complete without a discussion of the current political and social climate and what impact it has on this agenda going forward. The Trump administration denies the science of climate change and has embarked on an agenda of loosening the regulatory environment to stimulate economic growth. This is a similar script to that employed by President Ronald Reagan more than 35 years ago when he appointed Ann Gorsuch Burford to lead the US Environmental Protection Agency, James Watt to head the US Department of the Interior, and Rita Lavelle to run Superfund, the program for cleaning up the country’s most polluted sites.

Reagan’s appointments set about slowing or stopping environmental enforcement, but they ultimately led to scandals and created a critical public backlash: In 1983, all three were removed from office, and in subsequent years, Congress went on to strengthen numerous environmental regulations, and environmental groups increased membership and budgets. In the words of former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, Reagan “reinvented the environmental movement by his contempt for it.”

While President Trump’s approach to the environment bears similarities to Reagan’s attempts to roll back environmental regulations and likely faces a similar backlash, there are several key differences. First, some of the backlash this time will come from businesses that are leading on greenhouse gas reductions and not fighting government-led environmental policies, as they did in the 1980s. Indeed, recent surveys show that 85 percent of business executives believe that climate change is real (well above the national average of 64 percent), and many see the associated market risks and benefits. General Mills CEO Ken Powell was not alone when he told the Associated Press, “We think that human-caused greenhouse gas causes climate change and climate volatility, and that’s going to stress the agricultural supply chain.” Cargill executive director Greg Page warns of food shortages if we do not act. Such concerns represent a strong and growing perspective within the corporate sector that we have a problem and government inaction will only make it worse.

While those who lose in a carbon-constrained world (such as fossil fuel interests) will continue to resist acknowledging climate change, most companies see the long-term trajectory of this issue and do not see the current administration’s position as the long-term future. The market is shifting with or without the US government, as other national governments as well as many US state and city governments continue to set policies. Many companies are part of global markets and see the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement as ceding US leadership but not stopping the market transformation that is under way. Some markets may slow, but some may just move to other parts of the globe, such as Germany, India, and China, where heavy investments in renewable energy and alternative drivetrains (such as electric and hybrid) are viewed as the future of the energy and mobility sectors.

The public is also moving in favor of sustainability. Already, public opinion polls show that an increasing number of Americans believe climate change is real. Some even show that a majority of Republicans—including 54 percent of self-described conservative Republicans—now believe that the world’s climate is changing and that human beings play some role in the change. This is a marked shift from 2009, when just 35 percent of Republicans believed that climate change was real. The truth is that many Republican politicians, congressional aides, lobbyists, and staff believe in the science of climate change as well but are waiting for the right political cover to voice their views.

Concern for the environment is a long-term interest of the American public, one that is more latent than urgent and top of mind. While surveys show that it ranks low on election issue topics—number 12 in one poll, behind the economy, terrorism, foreign policy, and health care—it is also driven by saliency, and it will awaken when threatened. That awakening can be triggered by any number of levers. If history is any indication, smart business leadership will read these signs, anticipate the market shift, and seek to take advantage.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it with the detailed list of footnotes at SSIReview.]

***

At Creative Sage™, we love to connect corporate leaders and entrepreneurs with good causes, and help companies start genuine Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, Social Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, Impact Investing and/or philanthropy programs that are a win-win for all partners. We’re also researching new developments in the Sharing Economy that include new business models to increase profits, and also support social good.

Please do not hesitate to email us if you would like to discuss your situation and find out more about how we can help your organization move forward to a more innovative and profitable future, strengthening your branding and resonance with customers while helping to do good in the world through appropriate, authentic CSR partnerships with nonprofits, philanthropists, educational institutions and programs, or government agencies and community organizations.

We can also help you connect with celebrities and other notable people who can help amplify your message of social good, or headline entertainment events and concerts for good causes. You can call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley. We look forward to talking with you!

***

#sustainability #business #bcorps #csr #socent #socialentrepreneur #socialimpact #governmentinnovation #nonprofits #philanthropy #socialimpactinvesting #vc

4 notes · View notes

chocovivo · 5 years ago

Photo

Tues night Impact Conference at Annenberg Beach House supporting Social Impact Investing, Women Businesses, and Sustainability. Honored to be one of the sponsors along with the likes of @deloitte , @socaltechacademy and @idaireland , amongst others. . . . . #tuesdaynightsla #conference #sustainability #womenbusinessowners #entreprenuerher #socialimpactinvesting #investing #socialimpact #chocolatelover #cacao #socaltechacademy #idaireland (at Annenberg Community Beach House) https://www.instagram.com/p/B3AQP1jhbBb/?igshid=obgc3w2v8780

#tuesdaynightsla #conference #sustainability #womenbusinessowners #entreprenuerher #socialimpactinvesting #investing #socialimpact #chocolatelover #cacao #socaltechacademy #idaireland

0 notes

iixglobal · 7 years ago

Link

#pacific rise #SocialImpactInvesting #Socially_Responsible_Investing #Social_Impact_Bonds

0 notes

kellydiels · 6 years ago

Text

Musings on ‘Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World’, by Anand Giridharadas

If I had to select a scene from a movie to summarize this book, it would be the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends discover what’s behind the curtain.

There’s no magic. There’s no wizard. It’s all an illusion.

Ditto, ‘conscious capitalism’ and ‘social impact investing’: as the subtitle of the book tells us, it’s an elite charade.

Which is not to say we, as a culture, elite and non-elites, don’t believe it. We do.

I do/did -- this has been my work as a feminist marketing consultant!!!

Even as I’m nodding and agreeing with the pages in this book, it’s clear to me that I’ve now got to have some serious conversations with the woman in my mirror.

But that’s not my point, as I muse on this book. He’s right and he’s convinced and converted me. (I’ll probably do a proper, idea-by-idea book review of his book sometime soon.)

Instead, here’s what I noticed, as I read: that as Giridharadas chronicles the sincere ‘world-changing’ intent and language of founders and corporate leaders who are developing unmistakably commercial and profit-driven start-ups and businesses, he’s overlooking an important driver of entrepreneurship.

As a feminist marketing consultant, I work with the people who traditionally DON’T get their start-ups funding and even struggle to access bank loans or credit. Women and people of colour and gender nonconforming folks and people striving to emerge from intergenerational poverty (and, and, and).

They are starting businesses not because they have lofty ideals and want to create a business engine to deliver on those intents (though that might be part of if) but because they have to in order to survive.

Entrepreneurship has been the lifeblood of marginalized communities otherwise excluded from the corporate careers and access to governmental positions.

This is not a critique of Giridharadas’ book, at all. It’s a noticing.

As a culture, we most often explain entrepreneurship as something chosen to have “more freedom over our time” or to “change the world” or to “make more money”. We don’t often talk about the systemic realities FORCING many of us to start businesses just so that we’re in charge of our livelihoods rather than being inputs in a system that’s otherwise hostile to our existence.

I chose entrepreneurship, for example, because it was the only way to escape the impoverishment that comes with single motherhood. It was the only way I could manage mothering AND working.

At the time I became an entrepreneur, I talked about it with all the freedom/time language but the truth motivating my ‘choice’ was starker: there was no way, in the corporate culture I was in, for me to advance and grow my salary to one that was sustainable (I wasn’t even making enough to make ends meet) and also leave at 5pm on the dot to make sure I didn’t get fined by the daycare for being late. I was stuck and I was going to continue to be stuck.

Starting a business was a risk but it was the only one that potentially ended with me having a thriving livelihood.

The gender wage gap, the gender wealth gap, the sexism that made my ex refuse to pay child support for a decade, my absolute lack of resources (everything I had went to daycare and rent) plus a corporate culture that assumes careerists are men with partners at home to do the caregiving and builds expectations and hours around that sexist assumption...well, all of them intertwined to foreclose the possibility of a brilliant career and a paycheque that was sufficient. (not even huge; sufficient)

So I HAD to start a business. Or stay frantically treading water until I got too tired to stay afloat.

A decade later I am able to provide, handily, for my family and extended family. That would NEVER have been possible had I stayed in my corporate role.

Trans entrepreneurs often have to start businesses because no one will hire them. Disabled folks or people living chronic pain regularly find that their choices are fixed incomes or entrepreneurship, because bosses and teams won’t accommodate their physical realities.

Anand Giridharadas is rightfully, thankfully pointing out that founders of start-ups that go on to become institutions and and the 1% and the ‘winners’ of our current system have to invent a cover (often from their own consciences) for their business-building in order to give their work and their lives meaning. They have to cloak it in a world-changing rhetoric.

What I want to point out is this: entrepreneurs with marginalized identities ARE doing life-altering, community-changing work simply by refusing to be double-billed for their own oppression and creating the thriving livelihoods -- for themselves and their community members -- they’d otherwise be denied.

In a way, it seems that the more removed an entrepreneur or organization is from personal survival and on-the-ground community impact, the more elaborately inspirational and communal the mission statement, language and branding has to be...which, given the fact that I’m a feminist marketing consultant, again prompts me to have a serious sit-down in front of a mirror.

It’s easy to see the flaws in ‘their’ logic and ‘their’ business activities; but it’s important to attend to my own impact, too.

And there are definitely points of logic and conclusions in this book that uncomfortably highlight the fact that I’m doing some of the things he’s pointing out, even as I thought I wasn’t.

And of course I am. Our culture is thoroughly neoliberal and infected with the logic of capitalism, and I’ve been marinating in that for more than four decades.

As I tell my clients all the time: we are all in the water so we are all wet.

But if the water’s poisoned, we get out. We stop drinking it. We find out where the toxins are coming and we fix it, at the source. We don’t throw some cherry Kool-Aid in it and call it Revolution Juice.

Which is EXACTLY Anand Giridharadas’ excellent point in this excellent book.

#WeAreTheCultureMakers #feminstbookreview #consciouscapitalism #winnerstakeall #books #feministbooks #feministmarketing #socialimpact #socialimpactinvesting #socialenterprise #AnandGiridharadas worldchanging

0 notes

britishcandour · 2 years ago

Photo

Solve at MIT 2022: Demystifying world issues one connection at a time Read More 👉 https://www.candourmag.com/solve-at-mit-2022-demystifying-world-issues-one-connection-at-a-time/?feed_id=1028&_unique_id=629938023f4d5 UK’s Leading British Asian Magazine. Focusing on Fashion, Beauty, Parties, Celebrities, Music, Entertainment, Tech & More. Be ahead of all the biggest trends! 👍 up 👉 www.candourmag.com #23andMe #AfghanInstituteofLearning #AIforHumanityPrize #AnneWojcicki #ArtCultureandTechnologyProgram #AzraAkšamija #BIPOCentrepreneur #BostonGlobe #CivicsUnplugged #ethicalinnovation #HalaHanna #KaporEnterprises #MassachusettsInstituteofTechnology #MIT #MITNews #MITSolve #Moderna #NoubarAfeyan #PatrickJ.McgovernFoundation #RavenIndigenousCapitalPartners #Sapienship #socialimpactinvesting #SolveatMIT #Vodafone #YuvalNoahHarari #BritishCandour

0 notes

reelwurld · 4 years ago

Video

This is my dream: guiding people to tell better stories to change how they view themselves and the world. That’s what ReelwUrld is doing. We’re a company built by and for FANS, even down to anyone being able to own a piece of ReelwUrld. Join our first equity crowdfunding round the link in our bio by using the link below: https://netcapital.com/companies/reelwurld If you want to experience how we’re already making movies and shows with the world, take a look at @justiceforhire and consider joining the cast as a Hero, Client, or Villain and build a cinematic universe that has helps make the real world a better place. #patentpending #filmindustry #makemovieswiththeworld #startup #entrepreneurshiplifestyle #investingforimpact #hollywoodstudios #moviestogether #filmstudio #tvseries #televisionproduction #tech #tvproduction #losangeles #siliconvalley #nyc #filmmakersworld #filmmakerslife #venturecaptial #emmys #socialimpactinvesting #techstartup #investinginthefuture #investinginwomen #crowdfundingcampaign #oscars #invest #investinyourself #investing #investment (at Los Angeles, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/CKXBk7Ajpi6/?igshid=q97eruxr00bm

0 notes

socialinvesting · 9 years ago

Photo

Working with team members of R.K.Caldwell, development planning at its best in the City of Newark #RevampingNewarkNJ #socialimpactinvesting.

#socialimpactinvesting #revampingnewarknj

0 notes

creativesage · 6 years ago

Photo

(via Discovering a more inclusive private sector development where least expected)

By Eyerusalem Siba

Editor's Note:

Below is a viewpoint from Chapter 5 of the Foresight Africa 2019 report, which explores six overarching themes on the triumphs of the past years as well as strategies to tackle the remaining obstacles for Africa. Read the full chapter on Africa's untapped business potential.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have the lowest rates of business survival worldwide, and it is generally difficult to grow employment in SMEs. Africa is no different. Viable businesses struggle with typical growth challenges around lack of access to capital and markets and the skills gap. Finding sustained solutions to these core private sector development challenges requires exploring territories beyond providing targeted support to SMEs, including building a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem and embracing a more effective labor market and social protection policies.

Entrepreneurship needs to be nurtured, which should start with diagnosing the “scarcest resource” for enterprise development to maximize impact. Reliable funding is the lifeblood of any startup, yet in-depth knowledge of and experience in both domestic and international markets and managerial capability to run a firm of substantial size may well be far more important success factors than basic technical production knowledge. So how are the continent’s young populations and underrepresented groups supposed to acquire these much-needed entrepreneurial skills?

Africa is also home to one of the highest rates of necessity entrepreneurs in the world. Views on how to support necessity entrepreneurs are varied, ranging from giving the poor money to make use of their existing skills, to building firm capability, to overcoming sectoral and spatial mismatches to help necessity entrepreneurs transition out of existing enterprises or change the sector and location of current employment. The chosen tactic needs to be based on effective diagnosis of the scarcest resource and the market failures to be addressed. In many cases, microcredit and the provision of basic business trainings on technical skills can fail to generate meaningful impact on business performance of SMEs, notably for women-owned businesses.

While SMEs may have helped lift millions out of poverty through employment, provided first time employment to youth, and improved the wellbeing of SME owners, they have failed to create the large-scale and high-quality jobs that Africa needs. At the core of the challenge to SME development in Africa lies failed labor market policies and skill investment strategies to match the skill needs of growing industries. If growth of small firms into medium- or large-scale enterprises is a measure of success, most of these targeted micro-interventions would best be viewed as extensions of livelihood support programs. Within these programs, Africa needs the right mix of private sector development and labor market and social protection policies with clarity on which objectives are being promoted to improve targeting.

Beyond smart policies, inclusivity must be actively pursued by a range of stakeholders. This priority should be reflected in governments’ procurement policies, budgeting, and engagement with social entrepreneurs and innovators, as well as in the private sector’s participation in inclusive business models to advance both economic and social returns to investment.

Notably, for communities of stakeholders who chose to support a segment of underrepresented populations such as women and youth, a focus on the entrepreneur helps to identify binding constraints, leverage key strengths, and direct effective support. It is worth noting that women bring different sets of skills to labor markets; face different challenges within and outside their enterprises; and thrive in settings where a web of institutions and range of stakeholders promoting inclusion, forming an essential component of women’s “empowerment capital,” safeguard and promote their interests and address their specific challenges. The crucial ability here lies in identifying which skills and resources a woman needs to thrive in her given empowerment capital, and in expanding and enriching the latter.

Emerging evidence from psychology and experimental economics has advanced our understanding of effective pathways to best support women-owned SMEs. Notably, for successful interventions to be transformative, they need to move beyond basic access to financial and human capital and address central psychological, social, and skills constraints that women entrepreneurs face. Interventions which saw more transformative effects for female entrepreneurs have expanded capital and skill-centric programs with the provision of softer skills; agency, leadership, and mind-set considerations; market-focused programs, such as training to identify new market opportunities; and gender-lens investing to accommodate women participants’ schedules and provided free or affordable child care.

Finding lasting solutions to development challenges and creating a generation of entrepreneurs requires tapping into existing capabilities while filling gaps and scaling up successful pathways. Identifying cost-effective pathways should be an agenda of high priority to guide policies and inclusive and sustainable investments.

Related Content:

Foresight Africa: Top priorities for the continent in 2019

Spotlighting opportunities for business in Africa and strategies to succeed in the world’s next big growth market

Empowering women entrepreneurs in developing countries

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at its original source: Chapter 5 of the Foresight Africa 2019 report.]

***

#africa #africandevelopment #womenchangemakers #smes #sme #socialinnovation #socialimpactinvesting #socialentrepreneurship #socent #socinn #innovation #womenentrepreneurs #womensempowerment #development #womenshistorymonth #internationalwomensday #iwd2019

0 notes

creativesage · 6 years ago

Photo

(via The Need for Transformative Alliances between Social Entrepreneurs and the Private Sector)

By Arnaud Mourot / Disruptive Innovations

Today’s global issues have changed so dramatically in size and complexity that no single class of player can pretend to solve them alone.

As a result, alliances have been forged to tackle major issues (access to vaccines, new forms of energy, and food) but very often in emergency contexts and most of the time led by government or private donation programs.

Yet in a world marked by an increasing rate of change, social problems have become so widespread and numerous that these classical alliances between international or local NGOs and international bodies are no longer sufficient. New types of approaches must be invented that leverage market dynamics to solve our world’s most entrenched and challenging issues.

Ashoka Fellows, two-thirds of whom have partnered with for-profit companies, are leading the way on transformative alliances with the private sector. In this article we will share best practices and lessons from our Fellows on creating transformative change through strategic business alliances.

Why Social Entrepreneurs and Companies Need to Work More Closely Together

At Ashoka, we are convinced that social entrepreneurs can play a key role in this new paradigm because of their systems change mindset and their constant quest for more efficient, sustainable, and replicable solutions. More strategic alliances with the private sector will expand Fellows’ reach and impact while establishing companies on the cutting edge of new markets and opportunities.

Large Companies Face Challenges Reaching New Markets, Seeding Innovation, and Hiring Purpose-Driven Employees

On their end, large corporations are increasingly confronted with questions about their quest for purpose, their markets of tomorrow, attracting and retaining talent, and the need to do business in a way that enhances the world we live in.

Companies’ innovation strategies focus mainly on product development (through incremental processes) or on digital solutions, often without seeing the “big picture” and radically new approaches. Employees end up lacking purpose and leaving their job. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged in their work.1 Finally, most global corporations tend only to operate in the upper tier of the world’s pyramid, serving people who can afford their products or services. As a result, this space has become overcrowded, while, at the same time, many people still lack access to basic goods like electricity and running water, and companies repeatedly fail in approaching those “BOP” (Base of the Pyramid) markets which require totally different approaches and business models.

Social Entrepreneurs Are on the “Bleeding Edge” of New Markets, Innovation, and Purpose

Ashoka Fellows have a track record of demonstrating that their ideas can have profound impacts in the business sector. In the 2018 Global Fellows Study we found that 93 percent of Ashoka fellows have transformed market dynamics and 60 percent have created entirely new markets.

For instance, four years before the inception of Mpesa, Ashoka Fellow Brian Richardson co-founded an organization called Wizzit, servicing unbanked or underbanked people in South Africa which was recognized as the first mobile bank.

Eight years before the inception of Air B&B, Casey Fenton co-founded Couch Surfing, the first global network allowing travelers to find easily places to stay when travelling.

These innovations were developed to serve social purposes first, and had widespread social impact, but also ended up influencing future major corporate players who brought those innovations or some of their key components to the next level, giving millions more people access to these ideas.

Social entrepreneurs are very often ahead of the curve and can come up with disruptive innovations. However, one is forced to recognized that for all sorts of reason, especially cultural and structural, they barely can develop their innovations very broadly and are blocked by a glass ceiling.

Building stronger alliances between social entrepreneurs and the private sector seems like an obvious choice. So why are there so few examples of effective collaboration?

How Ashoka is Transforming Collaboration Between the Private and Social Sectors

Many attempts at collaboration between the for-profit and the not-for-profit sector have failed because of a lack of clear common framework, methodology, and the right governance scheme.

It took Ashoka some time (and many failures!) to understand that before even talking about doing business differently, we had to make the case to companies that it was worth investing in collaborative models with social entrepreneurs. Therefore, we decided to take a step back and to evolve our approach, explaining to our corporate partners that working with social entrepreneurs was not about doing business (at least not on the short term), but was instead about transforming their organizations to reach new markets with more innovative solutions. In order to do business differently companies have to look at the world with a new lens, be ready to rethink the way they operate and organize, and redefine traditional metrics of “success.” This shift only works if companies can form a changemaking culture internally (new skills and ways of organizing) and empower every single employee to be part of a meaningful process of change.

Making More Health: An Example for Companies to Engage More Deeply with Social Entrepreneurs

Ashoka’s work was dramatically accelerated by our partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), a global family-owned pharmaceutical company with which we have partnered since 2011 through the Making More Health initiative, an innovative 360° initiative that we co-created with “BI.”

This partnership is based on three major pillars that reflect the observations mentioned above:

www.makingmorehealth.org

This partnership has been an insightful learning journey for both of our organizations and has helped to validate assumptions we had about the benefits of bringing social entrepreneurs together with private companies:

Partnering with social innovators leads to more private sector innovation. A global community of hundreds of social innovators worldwide now interacts with BI in more than 40 countries and brings insights on various areas of corporate development and strategy.

Creating a critical mass of people understanding and practicing “changemaking” makes it easier to collaborate with others

In the case of BI, 5,000 (10 percent of its workforce) employees have been involved or trained in Making More Health. The global leadership development program now includes several Making More Health initiatives and aims to develop Accountability, Agility, and Intrapreneurship.

New business models have emerged based on social innovations that are directly connected to the strategy department of the company.

So far 10 million people have now accessed the various solutions that Making More Health helped to develop, and this is only the beginning. We also learned that setting a peer-to-peer type of governance between Ashoka and BI was key to sustaining such an initiative and keep the right long-term direction.

More interestingly, BI’s thinking about social impact through business has evolved from selling products to building local health ecosystems with other players (business, social, and public). For Ashoka, this partnership has had a transformative impact and helped us not only validate some of our assumptions but also replicate this 360° scheme with other companies and define a new kind of company we seek to partner with the “Changemaker Company.”

The Next Frontier: Changemaker Companies and Changemaker Organizations

Changemaker Companies are pioneering businesses that engage in solving social and environmental problems at scale through their core business. They do this by working hand in hand with their employees, consumers, and other strategic allies, including an ecosystem of social innovators and entrepreneurs. These visionary companies shift mindsets and the means of value creation as well as leadership and management practices, setting new global standards for conducting their business.

Becoming a changemaker company is a long process that impacts all dimensions of the organization: its Human Resources policy, its innovation process, and eventually its overall strategy and purpose. We are convinced that working with social entrepreneurs in that process can have a strong catalytic effect, as social entrepreneurs, in most cases, are themselves leaders of changemaker organizations.

Our goal is now to demonstrate that this transformation process applies not only to some “happy few,” but is relevant to any type of organization, regardless of size, industry, or legal structure. This will take time and effort, and many failures and learnings. But we are committed to contributing to a new kind of economy, one that is more respectful of the mankind and the planet, and we believe that new forms of collaboration between the private sector and social entrepreneurs can help pave the way.

Works Cited:

1 Mann, Annamarie, and Jim Harter. "The worldwide employee engagement crisis." Gallup Business Journal 7 (2016).

Author bio

Arnaud Mourot is the Global Leader for Strategic Corporate Alliances at Ashoka. A former member of the French team of Olympic wrestling for 10 years and a graduate from ESCP Business school, Arnaud has been involved in the humanitarian sector since he finished his studies. He founded and led the NGO “Play International” (formerly Sport Sans Frontières) and contributed to the development of various social businesses and CSOs in France. He joined Ashoka to launch its operations in France, Belgium, and Switzerland in 2005 and is the co-founder of the Making More Health partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim. Arnaud is married and the father of three children. He is based in Switzerland.

Issue 52

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Social Innovations Journal.]

***

#ashoka #ashokafellows #socent #socinn #alliances #socialimpact #ngos #nonprofit #nonprofits #philanthropy #socialimpactinvesting

0 notes

creativesage · 6 years ago

Link

By Amy Brown

This article series is sponsored by NRG Energy and went through our normal editorial review process.

As companies look to meet their greenhouse gas and climate targets, procuring renewable energy remains an attractive approach with the promise of big gains in reducing corporate carbon footprint.

Nearly two-thirds of Fortune 100 and nearly half of Fortune 500 companies have set ambitious renewable energy or related sustainability targets, according to the Business Renewables Center (BRC), an initiative of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Over 155 companies globally have committed to purchasing 100 percent renewable energy through the global initiative RE100. The BRC now counts 100 corporate buyers as members. Tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple, and large businesses like Starbucks, Target, General Motors and General Mills have all made huge investments in renewable energy.

Yet despite private sector enthusiasm for renewable energy, less than one-fourth of corporate renewable energy buyers in BRC’s network have completed an off-site transaction to date. With corporate renewable energy or greenhouse gas goals tied to 2020 soon coming due, companies have even more incentive to act sooner rather than later.

“We see a lot of opportunity in today’s energy market,” Lynda Clemmons, vice president of sustainable solutions at NRG Energy, the leading integrated-power company in the U.S., told TriplePundit. “We see demand drivers from businesses and throughout the supply chain. Both suppliers and consumers say they would rather do business with a company that is focused on sustainability and the environment — that shares the same values they do. It’s a push and pull, leading to the same thing: A desire for low-cost, reliable, sustainable energy.”

Renewables grow more competitive

Renewable energy is the fastest-growing energy source in the U.S, increasing 67 percent from 2000 to 2016, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Eighteen percent of all electricity in the U.S. was produced by renewable sources in 2017, including solar, wind, and hydroelectric dams, according to findings from the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Renewables are also increasingly competitive compared to other forms of energy. Solar and wind projects made up roughly 62% of new power construction in 2017, and their costs continue to plummet.

The reduced price point for renewable energy is a definite incentive for companies to make an investment in a clean energy future now, Clemmons says.

“Renewables are one of the most economical energy commodities out there,” she adds. “As a result, we are seeing a huge amount of corporate interest as well as utility interest in buying renewables.”

Corporate renewable deals amounted to nearly 5 GW in 2018, according to BSR’s deal tracker.

“That is the most we’ve ever seen—twice as much as 2017 and three times as much as in 2015,” Clemmons notes.

Simplifying the process

Some well-known, but resolvable, obstacles typically hold back a company’s progress in procuring renewable energy. According to Clemmons, it may be that the company is simply in the middle of an existing energy contract and is not in a position to invest right now.

“The other thing that holds a customer back is if they are in a geographical location that doesn’t offer a renewable energy option,” she explains.

One barrier to companies making the investment in off-site installations is that the process is considered cumbersome, Clemmons points out, with historical factors such as untenable contract sizes or lengths, difficult building logistics or complex financial transactions preventing companies from procuring wind and solar energy.

“In the past it’s been the larger companies with the resources and savvy to enter 25-year purchasing agreements,” Clemmons told TriplePundit. “But we wanted to make it possible for any company to incorporate renewables with the least cost and least amount of complications to buy renewable energy under a shorter agreement and be secure in knowing that there is a fixed price on their energy spend.”

Renewable Select changes the game

To address this need, NRG has developed a plan called Renewable Select to simplify the renewables procurement process and make it easier for companies to choose renewables.

The plan transforms the lengthy and complex traditional energy procurement process into a cost competitive, easy to execute transaction.

Its benefits, according to NRG, include:

A standard contract with straightforward terms, no need to sign a power purchase agreement (PPA)

Renewable energy procured in the amount desired, no large commitments required

A simplified corporate approval process, no lengthy 20-year contracts

A single, consolidated bill, no juggling multiple bills by electricity source

The ability to point to the physical location where your renewable electricity is produced and even the opportunity to receive naming rights

“Renewable Select is completely changing the game,” Clemmons says. “For instance, a traditional Power Purchasing Agreement (PPA) can take 12 to 18 months just to negotiate. With Renewable Select, we can close the transaction and get everyone comfortable in less than two months—a tremendous time saver.”

“Compared to what is generally available in the market, Renewable Select offers fixed price solutions for renewable energy at very competitive rates. That is a huge benefit to companies, to be able to lock in that figure in their energy budget,” she explains.

“At the same time, companies who go for off-site installations through Renewable Select are contributing to the local grid,” she adds. “They gain the renewable energy credits as well as the ability to talk about the investment as part of their sustainability commitment.”

In one example, leading global foodservice distribution company Sysco announced in July a ten-year renewable energy agreement with NRG Energy. The company will install three solar garden sites in the Houston and Dallas areas, which will support approximately 10 percent of Sysco’s U.S. electricity usage.

NRG customized a simple electricity solution through Renewable Select, in a familiar fixed price structure that benefits Sysco’s operations, bottom line and the environment, Clemmons says.

Helping communities go solar

Another way in which NRG helps customers participate in the marketplace is through community solar projects, and Renewable Select is making that easier.

“We connect developers and their projects with the customer and help communities get access to a solar facility at a fixed price,” Clemmons says, adding that NRG has experience contracting hundreds of MWs of community solar.

In the past, Clemmons explains, NRG had to use its own in-house shop to develop renewables projects. Then, in August 2018, NRG announced the sale of its Renewables Platform and controlling interest in NRG Yield, Inc. to Global Infrastructure Partners, which formed Clearway Energy Group, one of the largest clean energy companies in the U.S.

“With the divestiture of our in-house renewables development shop and our increased focus on the customer, we have pivoted to providing a broad range of consulting and services to customers,” Clemmons says. “Now we’re free to contract with Clearway—or any other developer (like Cypress Creek, who we partnered with for the Sysco project)—which enables us to be more flexible when it comes to pricing and other transaction features.”

Looking ahead to continued growth

Currently, Renewable Select is available anywhere in the U.S. where there is a competitive electricity market. Clemmons says NRG has the ability to be a third-party seller where electricity is still regulated, but that can be a more difficult as such deals need to go through the existing utilities.

Looking ahead to the next 18 months, Clemmons predicts that the approach offered by Renewable Select will generate a significant amount of business.

“We’ve had such a tremendous level of interest,” Clemmons says. “Now we’re focused on making sure that what we provide is exactly what customers need, and that the agreements with developers match up to that.”

Image: Unsplash/Tim Foster

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Triple Pundit.]

***

#ss:nrg2018 #csr #socent #socinn #socialimpact #socialimpactinvesting #philanthropy #sustainability #renewables #renewableselect #nrg #LyndaClemmons

0 notes