It’s been a week since Nestlé held its second international Creating Shared Value Forum, which has given me time to reflect on the day’s lively series of debates.
The decision to invite some of - in Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck’s words - ‘the best minds available’ to discuss the role that business and other global partners can play in addressing key challenges in nutrition, water, and rural development over the next decade, was guaranteed to generate a fascinating variety of opinions.
In the end, these came not only from the Forum’s expert speakers, but also the government officials, academics, and charity, NGO, and media representatives in the audience, the 3,500 people from who followed the live webcast online, and all those who submitted questions to the panel and took part in the parallel online discussion here.
Although the Forum served to highlight the complexity of the problems in hand, and the fact that they have are no simple solutions, the extent to which they resonated with a cross-section of international society was clear.
Whether it was Peter Brabeck asserting “that corporate philanthropy is absolutely wrong”, Jane Nelson of Harvard Kennedy School observing that partnerships “are absolutely critical to the delivery of shared value”, or the online participants asking if a company’s commitment to sustainable practices can impact its profitability, or what multinationals like Nestlé can do to encourage best practice among small farmers, participants were motivated one thing: the desire to achieve lasting impact by finding better ways of working together.
If there a consensus was to be had, it was that Creating Shared Value, championed by Nestlé as the operating model which goes beyond traditional concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility, could be a real driver of positive collaborative action if private, public and civil institutions are prepared to enter an open constructive dialogue, where knowledge about potential risk, as well as value creation, is freely shared.
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