Businesses are under increasing scrutiny from their employees, their customers and governments to help solve the global challenges we face in the world.
Limiting the harm a business causes to our planet and society is no longer enough - real transformation means creating positive social and environmental value for society.
At Yunus Social Business, we focus on the ‘S’ of the ESG triangle, social businesses that solve pressing human challenges. Our research looks at how companies can transform to purpose-led organisations through practical experiences, case studies and tools.
Through social intrapreneurship, growing social businesses and initiatives from within the company, social procurement, partnering with and integrating social enterprises into their supply chains, or whether change comes from the top-down from C-level and shareholder action, our research lays out actionable pathways for transformation. And for those that are not already convinced of the purpose-mission, we run quantitive experiments within companies to make the case for social intrapreneurship.
We call it business as unusual.
/ˈsəʊ.ʃəl ɪntrəprəˈnɜːʃɪp/
A Social Intrapreneur is an entrepreneurial employee who develops a profitable new product, service, or business model that creates value for society and her company.
Social intrapreneurs help their employers meet sustainability commitments and create value for customers and communities in ways that are built to last.
These top five benefits demonstrate the value of social intrapreneurship beyond authentically displaying corporate purpose. More than 90% of the initiatives that were aligned with the company's core strategy benefited from C-Level buy-in and placed the initiative as a strategic project. Those initiatives that were launched mostly as a CSR initiative struggled the most to get C-Level attention.
Social Intrapreneurship even has the power to positively change the DNA of the company: 24% of all interviewees already see their initiative as a catalyst toward company transformation into a force for good. And it pays to stay pure: Initiatives that were set up as a Social Business – a financially sustainable business model that focuses on impact first while eliminating any profit motive – enjoyed more than 2x higher likelihood of leading to transformation.
Curiously, it was noted that often the largest hurdles faced by social intrapreneurs came from internal obstacles at their companies, rather than from external challenges: 84% listed internal structure as a challenging factor.
Impoves employee engagement, job satisfaction, employee skills or talent attraction.
Leads to mindset shifts, culture change of even kicks off corporate transformation.
Spurs business innovation.
Reaches new markets or new customers.
Improves corporate brand equity.
Built on the hard-earned wisdom of global programme managers, this playbook is a quick reference guide for organizations looking to build support structures for social intrapreneurs.
The Quick Check touches on the seven most important areas for social innovation and assesses how ready you and your company are to support social entrepreneurship.
The Readiness Assessment is a quick way of benchmarking your organisation's capacity for social innovation.
Social Procurement can be both profitable and valuable but companies and social enterprises need support to make the partnerships work. In this report we map the social procurement journey, providing case studies and practical tools for companies that want to start ‘buying social’.
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Discover how you can create inclusive value chains by buying from social businesses.
More and more corporate leaders are seeking ways to amplify their corporate purpose and transform their companies into a force for good. But how does this purpose agenda play out from the top down? We are speaking to CEOs and shareholders in a series of qualitative interviews to lift the lid on their experiences.
The Quick Check touches on the seven most important areas for social innovation and assesses how ready you and your company are to support social entrepreneurship.
The Readiness Assessment is a quick way of benchmarking your organisation's capacity for social innovation.
More and more corporate leaders are seeking ways to amplify their corporate purpose and transform their companies into a force for good. But how does this purpose agenda play out from the top down? We are speaking to CEOs and shareholders in a series of qualitative interviews to lift the lid on their experiences.
Building on the qualitative interviews with over 50 multinationals, ‘Making the Case’ undertook practical experiments or studies as empirical research with three multinational companies: a major Global Retailer, MAN Truck & Bus and Covestro. This work resulted in over 1300 data points. By linking the companies' social intrapreneurship activities to key performance metrics, ‘Making The Case’ starts to build the business case for Social Intrapreneurship.
The results of our quantitative research sought to evidence the benefits identified by the Social Intrapreneurs in the first report. In order to drive change, Intrapreneurs need solid, convincing facts on how their initiatives could benefit the overall performance of the company — to ‘Make The Case’.
With this research, we invite companies and Social Intrapreneurs to look inside their own companies and ‘Make The Case’ for SI themselves. We have started with three companies who wanted to go into more depth to prove the case for social intrapreneurship. But we will go further to develop a larger dataset supporting the business case for social intrapreneurship.
Ready To Prove It In More Depth For Your Own Company?
We’ve built a practical toolkit to help you run your own assessments and experiments. Our research methodology is open source - the tools are in your hands.
The Quick Check touches on the seven most important areas for social innovation and assesses how ready you and your company are to support social entrepreneurship.
The Readiness Assessment is a quick way of benchmarking your organisation's capacity for social innovation.