Article by Kriss Deiglmeier: “In 2011, I was co-teaching a course on Corporate Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, when our syllabus nearly went astray. A paper appeared in Harvard Business Review (HBR), titled “Creating Shared Value,” by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer. The students’ excitement was palpable: This could transform capitalism, enabling Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to bend the arc of history toward not just efficiency and profit, but toward social impact…
History shows that the promise of shared value hasn’t exactly been realized. In the past decade, most indexes of inequality, health, and climate change have gotten worse, not better. The gap in wealth equality has widened – the combined worth of the top 1% in the United States increased from 29% of all wealth in 2011 to 32.3% in 2021 and the bottom 50% increased their share from 0.4% to 2.6% of overall wealth; everyone in between saw their share of wealth decline. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 per hour while the US dollar has seen a cumulative price increase of 27.81%…
That said, data is by no means the only – or even primary – obstacle to achieving shared value, but the role of data is a key aspect that needs to change. In a shared value construct, data is used primarily for profit and not the societal benefit at the speed and scale required.
Unfortunately, the technology transformation has resulted in an emerging data divide. While data strategies have benefited the commercial sector, the public sector and nonprofits lag in education, tools, resources, and talent to use data in finding and scaling solutions. The result is the disparity between the expanding use of data to create commercial value, and the comparatively weak use of data to solve social and environmental challenges…
Data is part of our future and is being used by corporations to drive success, as they should. Bringing data into the shared value framework is about ensuring that other entities and organizations also have the access and tools to harness data for solving social and environmental challenges as well….
Business has the opportunity to help solve the data divide through a shared value framework by bringing talent, product and resources to bear beyond corporate boundaries to help solve our social and environmental challenges. To succeed, it’s essential to re-envision the shared value framework to ensure data is at the core to collectively solve these challenges for everyone. This will require a strong commitment to collaboration between business, government and NGOs – and it will undoubtedly require a dedication to increasing data literacy at all levels of education….(More)”.