Mechanism
Companies can create shared value opportunities in three ways:
- Reconceiving products and markets – Companies can meet social needs while better serving existing markets, accessing new ones, or lowering costs through innovation
- Redefining productivity in the value chain – Companies can improve the quality, quantity, cost, and reliability of inputs and distribution while they simultaneously act as a steward for essential natural resources and drive economic and social development
- Enabling local cluster development – Companies do not operate in isolation from their surroundings. To compete and thrive, for example, they need reliable local suppliers, a functioning infrastructure of roads and telecommunications, access to talent, and an effective and predictable legal system
Many approaches to CSR pit businesses against society, emphasizing the costs and limitations of compliance with externally imposed social and environmental standards. CSV acknowledges tradeoffs between short-term profitability and social or environmental goals, but focuses more on the opportunities for competitive advantage from building a social value proposition into corporate strategy.
Read more about this topic: Creating Shared Value
Famous quotes containing the word mechanism:
“I’ve never known a Philadelphian who wasn’t a downright “character;” possibly a defense mechanism resulting from the dullness of their native habitat.”
—Anita Loos (1888–1981)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“A mechanism of some kind stands between us and almost every act of our lives.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 2 (1962)