About Shared Value

The Reinvention of Capitalism: Is Porter and Kramer’s "Shared Value" the new way of doing "good business"?

Several scholars (Stuart Hart, Mark Milstein, Jed Emerson, and Chris Laszlo ’80 among them) have explored and developed the concept of shared or sustainable value. In their Harvard Business Review article (Jan/Feb ’11) Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer described the concept of “Shared Value” as a “management strategy focused on companies creating measurable business value by identifying and addressing social problems that intersect with their business.”

Porter and Kramer’s framework “creates new opportunities for companies, civil society organizations, and governments to leverage the power of market-based competition in addressing social problems.” Based on a set of core principles—companies reconceiving their products and markets to address unmet social needs, redefining productivity in their value chain to build in environmental and societal gains, and working strategically to build local clusters of development within regions and communities to support the overall skills set and competitiveness—companies can achieve greater profitability and sustainability whilst simultaneously creating social value; doing good business, that is also business for good.

The Lax Conference 2016 will present perspectives and examples, and cultivate discussion, on the theme of “Shared Value” at a time when commercial and social goals in business are increasingly blurred.