Ashoka Spotlights Hybrid Value Chains in HBR
John Elkington
September 4, 2010
I read the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review on a train ride alongside Lac Leman on Thursday, including the wonderful piece by Bill Drayton and Valeria Budinich of Ashoka, on how “corporations and social entrepreneurs can reshape industries and solve the world’s toughest problems.”
They focus on the evolution of ‘hybrid value chains’ – and I was interested to see them spotlight the potential for “win-win-win” outcomes, a concept I first introduced in an article in the California Management Review in 1994.
And the value of markets that might be reached using hybrid value chains? That was estimated at $6 trillion by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in 2005 – and Drayton and Budinich suggest that, on conservative estimates, the value has been growing at a rate of 5% a year since.
The four criteria for a successful hybrid value chain are:
- The business has the potential to be large in scale and to cross borders.
- For-profits and social entrepreneurs work together to create multiple kinds of value.
- Consumers – broadly defined – pay for the product or service.
- A system-changing idea provides the basis for new competition.
