Hybrid Value Chain: Opening New Markets to For-Profits and Social Enterprises

The following is an excerpt from an article at SocialEarth.org, a social entrepreneurship and innovation blog.

When local citizen groups in Mexico convinced Amanco, a large producer of water-conveyance products, to team up and support under-served small farmers, they created a new irrigation technology market worth about $56 million a year and the farmers were able to double, or even triple their income — a win-win for profits and social responsibility. This is just one of many new examples of a “Hybrid Value Chain,” a newly functional  idea in business-operations framework profiled in a recent Harvard Business Review article.

“This wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago, because the citizen sector hadn’t developed yet,” says Bill Drayton, the Founder and CEO of Ashoka, a collaboration of almost 3,000 leading social entrepreneurs from every continent — half of which have changed public policy within five years of being chosen for an Ashoka fellowship.

The concept stems from the incredible reach and work of citizen-sector organizations (e.g. social enterprises and nonprofits) in communities across the globe and the technological efficiency of innovative for-profit companies. Combine the two and you create a value component that neither organization, nor company, can reach by themselves.

Read the rest at SocialEarth.org.