A new impact economy is being built, one where businesses prioritize and consider their impact on all stakeholders —including communities, workers, customers, and the environment. Innovation Pioneers and Ignite Sweden has teamed up for joint iX Sessions in 2021 on the theme ”Shareholder vs Stakeholder value”. The goal is to share, learn and co-create a shift for our member companies to a stakeholder focus to benefit more sustainable and profitable business models.
The team at Googol co-hosted the first session and gave an introduction to Stakeholder values and long-termism. They recorded the below video to summarize the concept of Shareholder vs Stakeholder values. Sources: Measuring the Economic impact of short-termism, McKinsey (2017) and Corporate long-term behaviors, McKinsey & FCLT Global (2020).
SUMMARY AND CLOSING THOUGHTS
The learnings and reflections from this first iX Session on ’Shareholder vs Stakeholder values’ can be summarized with the following five key take-aways:
- It is Top Management’s role to formulate a long-term strategy, commit to stakeholder value creation, to fund the necessary strategic initiatives, to lead the transformation, and to manage expectations. Innovation Management can play an instrumental role to support their Top Management on this endeavor.
- The Innovation Management’s role is to make sure the Innovation Portfolio is aligned with the Strategy and takes key stakeholder interests into consideration. Work out a plan with Top Management if the Portfolio is not well balanced, too narrow in scope, or not appropriately funded or staffed.
- If the strategy is not clear and/or long-term enough, i.e. you do not know exactly where you are going, you need to secure Top Management’s trust to involve the perspectives from all key stakeholders to expand the opportunities and better see future possibilities.
- Systematically identify the key stakeholders of the company and make sure to understand what keeps them up at night. Understand how the company can have an impact on their needs and how this benefits the shareholders in the long run. Be concrete and authentic about how the company intends to meet the needs.
- At the end of the day all innovation involves change, sometimes transformational. The more change required to make innovation happen the more important that Innovation Management has mandate to be proactively involved in removing obstacles and barriers, and fostering an innovation culture.
Thank you to the team at Googol, Jan Sandqvist, Henrik Gustafson and Matias Pakarinen, for co-hosting and facilitating the session together with the Innovation Pioneers and Ignite Sweden teams. A big thank you also to Nils Söderström at Renbloc, Nicklas Friberg at Lindab, and Martin Högenberg at CGI for sharing your perspectives. And of course, thank you to all participants for taking part and sharing your insights and learnings on shifting to a stakeholder focus.
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