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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      Intelligent Design of Inclusive Growth Strategies
      04 Dec 2019Working Paper Summaries

      Intelligent Design of Inclusive Growth Strategies

      by Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim, and Eduardo Tugendhat
      How companies, working with a catalyst, can redesign supply chains to achieve economic, environmental, and social returns.
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      Author Abstract

      Improving corporate engagement with society, as advocated in the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement, should not be viewed as a zero-sum proposition where attention to new stakeholders detracts from delivering shareholder value. Corporate programs for sustainable and ethical sourcing practices, however, have fallen far short of solving the underlying causes of extreme poverty, extensive use of child labor, and threats to the environment and human health. We identify several causes to explain this disappointing shortfall in societal performance, including traditional company policies and incentives that inhibit the implementation of innovative, inclusive growth strategies. We propose the role for a new actor, a catalyst, to help companies forge new relationships with external funders, local intermediary companies, NGOs, and community leaders. The catalyst aligns the multiple stakeholders from multiple sectors into enduring, mutually beneficial relationships that produce more value than that currently produced when stakeholders connect only by transactional relationships. The catalyst attracts funding from public and private sources to invest in the new ecosystem, which can generate attractive financial returns while alleviating poverty and environmental degradation. Finally, the catalyst engages the multiple participants to collectively co-create explicit strategies and scorecards of metrics, which serve to motivate, create accountability, and enable an enduring governance model for a multi-stakeholder ecosystem.

      Paper Information

      • Full Working Paper Text
      • Working Paper Publication Date: October 2019
      • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #20-050
      • Faculty Unit(s): Accounting and Management
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      Robert S. Kaplan
      Robert S. Kaplan
      Senior Fellow, Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus
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      George Serafeim
      George Serafeim
      Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration
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