How can you evaluate if your business idea creates value for society?

1 Identify your stakeholders

Stakeholders are the people or groups that are affected by your business idea, directly or indirectly. They can include your customers, suppliers, employees, investors, competitors, regulators, and the general public. To identify your stakeholders, you can use tools such as stakeholder mapping or analysis, which help you visualize and prioritize their interests, needs, and expectations. By understanding your stakeholders, you can identify how your business idea can benefit or harm them, and how you can address their concerns or opportunities.

2 Assess your impact

Impact is the change that your business idea makes on the world, whether it is intended or unintended, positive or negative, short-term or long-term. To assess your impact, you can use frameworks such as the triple bottom line, which measures your performance in terms of economic, social, and environmental aspects, or the theory of change, which explains how your activities lead to your desired outcomes. By measuring your impact, you can quantify and communicate the value that your business idea creates for society, and how you can improve or scale it.

3 Align with your values

Values are the principles or beliefs that guide your decisions and actions as an entrepreneur. They reflect your purpose, vision, and mission for your business idea. To align with your values, you can use tools such as the value proposition canvas, which helps you define how your business idea solves a problem or satisfies a need for your customers, or the business model canvas, which helps you design how your business idea delivers and captures value. By aligning with your values, you can ensure that your business idea is consistent with your personal and professional goals, and that it resonates with your target market and society.

4 Seek feedback

Feedback is the information or opinions that you receive from others about your business idea, whether it is positive or negative, formal or informal, solicited or unsolicited. To seek feedback, you can use methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, or experiments, which help you collect and analyze data from your potential or existing customers, stakeholders, or experts. By seeking feedback, you can validate or invalidate your assumptions, test or refine your hypotheses, and learn or improve from your mistakes or successes.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?