As we continue our journey into the 21st century, we are facing staggering challenges which will require us to achieve incredible feats of reinvention and reorganization if we are to continue living sustainably on this planet. That certainly is no new idea but where the interesting and exciting stuff lies is in the implications for what that means. One of the things we need to reinvent and change is the way we do business, and I am not talking about buying more fair-trade stuff or shopping at farmer’s markets but how we think about sourcing, procurement, employee retention, government regulation and intervention, and completely rethinking various economic sectors from energy to agriculture.
Business cannot continue with the business as usual model we learned in university where the sole purpose of a firm is to create wealth for its shareholders. Businesses in the 21st century that cling to that outdated ideology will certainly lose their footing to fall by the wayside as other progressive firms take market share by implementing business models that are designed to appropriately integrate operations within ecological systems and ensure positive social impact. That is because people are waking up to the reality that business cannot continue and need not continue its exploitative nature as new definitions of wealth creation emerge and a new changing reality impose the need for radical innovation if we are to live equitably and sustainably within systems that require prudent management of finite resources.
Social enterprise and social (and environmental) entrepreneurs are the very innovators, change-makers and shape-shifters that will pave the way towards a better future. They are the folks behind finding market solutions to market failure which have subjugated large sections of humankind to incredible hardships whether that be lack of access to affordable healthcare, lack of access to healthy food and clean water, lack of access to energy or telecommunication services, among many other issues.
And it is not just about the “feel-good” humanitarian, environmental aspects that are an obvious motivator, both in terms of benefit and necessity, but there is substantial economic opportunity to finding market solutions to where only market failures existed. For example, the World Resource Institute estimated that the bottom-of-the-pyramid market (low-income populations) worldwide have a total purchasing power of $5 trillion. That offers an attractive prospect by binding the idea of profit-making innovation with improving livelihoods. The BOP market constitutes huge untapped market potential and currently it is wide open because of the popular notion that the folks who are in poverty don’t offer any profitable potential.
But one doesn’t have to look far for example after example of companies that have tested and succeeded with business models to offer essential services to their BOP clients. Grameen Bank, the pioneer financial institution to bring about the microfinance revolution or Aravind Eye Care System that has profitably performed 2.8 million eye surgeries and handled over 22 million outpatients while astoundingly charging below market prices or providing free services to over 60% of its clientele.
And not only does there exists proven financial incentives to getting involved in offering services to the BOP market, there is the ultimate moral imperative of achieving human sustainability too. Everyone deserves access to education, healthcare, clean water, energy to power their homes and small businesses, access to information, and all the other services deemed essential and taken for granted here in the States. But there also exists the threatening crisis of climate change which no one can escape from.
Climate change represents the single greatest obstacle to our collective survival (not just anthropic survival but the majority of species on the planet) and what makes it more threatening is the fact that governments still contest its legitimacy. And what makes it more of a challenge than say nuclear proliferation is that appropriately addressing climate change so as to ensure we stay below a boiling point is that it requires of us a complete overhaul in the sectors of energy, food, water, transportation, building, and urban planning, just to name a few. In short, we need to radically rethink and reinvent the way we live.
And the best way to help facilitate and accelerate that pace of change is to unleash the power of unreasonable people, to borrow the phrase from the popular book whose title is that – the social and environmental entrepreneurs who can and will reinvent how we meet our needs. Let’s just hope our governments will help and not hinder the transition.
