Business for Good

Motivating shared value creation in Hong Kong

Context

The coronavirus pandemic triggered the biggest global economic, health care and social crisis in centuries. Post-pandemic, the business landscape is complex and uncertain. With technological advancements, the widening gap between rich and poor, the rise in populism, and an increasingly crowded marketplace, Hong Kong businesses were under pressure to reflect on their approaches and consider new ways of doing things.
While the belief that profit generation is the sole purpose of a business still prevails among the local business community, some businesses were beginning to co-create value with their employees, customers, suppliers or other key stakeholders based on shared interests and values. How that trend could be accelerated needed defining.

Our Approach

With the support of the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Fund, SIX brought The Hong Kong Social Entrepreneurship Forum, Ernst & Young and InnoFoco Limited together to understand businesses’ motivations for creating shared value.
We explored the motivations and push and pull factors in adopting a stakeholder-centric approach across eighteen case studies, and investigated whether the younger generation are playing an increasingly important role in influencing business behaviour. These insights helped us build recommendations on the wider promotion of the concept of ‘business for good’.

Value

The resulting report defined and analysed the different ways businesses have gone beyond shareholder value to embrace stakeholder and social value in 4 key areas: legal structures and new legal forms; standards and criteria; strategies; and Intentions and mindsets. It also provided concrete recommendations on the wider applications of ‘business for good’ for different Hong Kong stakeholder groups, particularly government, business, educators and the media.