Unleashing a new mindset for global impact

With imagination, you can see how to create social impact in an entirely new light. Because while individual organizations serving society may shine brightly on their own, the impact they could make if they teamed up to solve the world’s most intractable societal problems could be truly spectacular.

That new mindset took center stage last year in Copenhagen at the inaugural global innovation lab, UNLEASH. There, a thousand carefully chosen, young social entrepreneurs came together from across the world to develop innovative approaches to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Working in teams, these young talents collaborated to develop, present and win support for ingenious solutions to tough social challenges, such as:

• Implementing blockchain technology to detect counterfeit vaccines.
• Wrapping cargo pallets with reusable, stretchable Lycra? instead of single-use plastic wraps to greatly reduce plastic waste, petroleum use and CO? emissions.
• Creating black soldier fly farms to transform food waste into animal feed and fertilizer.
• Enabling people to use artificial intelligence to self-monitor and detect colorectal cancer.

These are just a small number of the solutions that are now being supported by the UNLEASH ecosystem of investors, experts, mentors and more than 200 organizations globally, including Deloitte.

In connecting people and organizations from all over the world to imagine new solutions to intractable societal problems, UNLEASH has created a new mindset around social impact, a new mindset focused on working together to deliver innovative, coordinated, global action that achieves results.

This mindset continued to gain momentum this week in Singapore at UNLEASH 2018. For the second straight year, Deloitte served as UNLEASH’s primary innovation leader and facilitated the world’s largest innovation workshop.

It’s a role we’re proud to play. Multiple surveys show public trust and confidence in government, business, NGOs and media is at an all-time low. Business, however, is considered the most likely of these groups to have a positive impact on the world’s most difficult challenges.

Why? Consider some of these factors:

• Responsiveness: Business is wired with a bias for action—either preemptively, as a source of first-mover advantage; or reactively, as a mechanism to regain competitiveness. Individual and institutional buyers who once purchased products and services now buy brands and relationships, and they can see through inauthentic corporate gestures to win market favor. They demand—and businesses are delivering—responsive action to buyers’ concerns.
• Innovation: Business prizes the ability to meet customer and client needs better, quicker and more efficiently, and has tangible incentives for introducing creative, never-before-conceived ideas that eradicate problems.
• Scalability: Coordinated global efforts to solve the complex problems of our time have not kept pace with societal needs. In other words, the problems are more agile and adaptive—so coordination to solve them requires the same. Business has what it takes to scale coordinated efforts that take big bites out of big problems instead of nibbling on the edges.
• Talent: Businesses, including Deloitte, are preparing their people for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The ability to innovate, think creatively and deliver social impact alongside financial returns are all core competencies that businesses can offer to these challenges.

Business cannot succeed if society fails. But society has far less chance at succeeding if business fails to lead. So, it’s up to us to work together to contribute everything that business knows—including responsiveness, innovation and scalability—and channel these resources with focus and force to address society’s most difficult challenges. Unleashing that kind of power has the potential to brighten our collective future. That’s something I think we should all fix our gazes upon.

Originally published June 7, 2018 on Forbes.com.