Design Thinking Workshop Update!

I’ve had the pleasure of spending the last few months working with a bright and energetic group of Tuckies to organize the Business and Society Conference and, more specifically, the Design Thinking workshop.

I was asked to join the team based partly on my undergrad experience in Industrial Engineering and Design and, as the meetings began and I learned more, I realized two things: How interesting this concept of Design Thinking is and how little my prior experience was applicable.
As an aspiring management/strategy consultant, I was pleased to see how prevalent Design Thinking was in the consulting world, from companies like IDEO and Innosight up to and including "The Big Three".

For those interviewing for or entering consulting, this will be a great workshop and should be immediately applicable. Clients are now expecting (if not demanding) that these concepts be present in final recommendations. It will also be really fun. This year’s workshop features a
case that Merritt Patridge* (Townsend) and I wrote about the Upper Valley Haven. Andrew Waldeck, a partner at Innosight, will be facilitating the case along with some of our wonderful Tuck professors (including our back-flipping classmate’s favorite), Renee Weeks from the UVH and two students from Dartmouth’s Design for America team. It was a really cool experience to help write a case from scratch as opposed to reading one and hoping not to get cold called.

Anyway, come enjoy free breakfast and lunch and experience a really cool workshop that should pay dividends no matter what you will be doing this summer or fall (unless you are sponsored and will be working at the Bridge Program - then you should just come for the free food).

Matt Zepernick T’13

*When I say “Merritt and I” I mean Merritt did almost everything. Thanks Merritt! She worked incredibly hard and did a fantastic job on this case. If you enjoy it, please thank her as well.

Investing with Impact Update!

Whether you call it ‘profit with purpose’ or ‘happy
returns’, impact investing has received quite some press recently as an
emerging new asset class. J.P.Morgan in late 2010 published a report in which
the firm was very bullish about impact investing, predicting that by 2020
between $400 billion and $1 trillion would be invested this way. But what
really is impact investing? As The Economist put it in a recent article: “Five
years ago anyone wanting explicitly to combine financial returns with virtue
was limited to investing in social housing for poorer people in rich countries,
microcredit and a handful of ethical mutual funds that shun sinful shares such
as tobacco and defense companies.” Today, not only the number, but also the
range of impact investors has grown and so has the variety of investments they
make.

Our panel will not only consider how we can define and
better understand this trend, but also address the opportunities and practical
challenges around impact investing today. Elizabeth Glenshaw, portfolio manager
and managing director of Clean Yield Asset Management, and Shuaib Siddiqui,
portfolio manager at the Acumen Fund, together with our moderator Professor
John Vogel, bring diverse experiences and perspectives to the topic. A key
challenge is how to develop better metrics to measure performance, and we will
hear first-hand examples at how firms like the Acumen Fund try to measure and
‘monetize’ social impact. And we will ask some thought-provoking questions such
as whether traditional venture capital structures and mandates need to change
for us to really start making an impact.

It’s great to see so much interest in linking investment
choices with better social and environmental outcomes, but is it really
possible to move away from the profit imperative we hear so much about at
business school? With impact investing becoming such a hot topic, this panel is
a must-attend for any Tuck student interested in finance, investing, banking or
private equity.

We look forward to seeing you on Thursday at 3:30pm in
Frantz II!

For in-depth background reading, see the 2010 J.P.Morgan
report on impact investment here.

For a quick update on recent developments, see this
Economist article here.

Submit your questions here.

Social Impact as Strategy Update! - Walmart example

What does it mean to talk about social impact “as strategy”? Social responsibility is often considered a corporate communications function, not a strategic function. Some would claim that social impact is strategic only for brands with a social image, such as Patagonia or Whole Foods. Our response is that social impact and shared value can be a critical part of strategy for any company, and I thought I’d illustrate it with an example from an infamously profit-focused, hard-nosed company: Walmart.

Not strategic: Philanthropy
Corporate social responsibility often includes philanthropy, such as Walmart giving $20K to a local Florida anti-hunger organization. These efforts have some return to Walmart in the form of improved reputation, but the fundamental goal is good community citizenship – not value creation and profit maximization.

Not strategic: Simple cost reductions
Often, when talking about social impact, people think of environmental sustainability.
Using fewer resources is of course ecologically responsible and it does improve the bottom line. For example, Walmart designed a new store prototype that uses 30% less energy, helping the planet and the bottom line at the same time. However, these types of easy wins are easily
replicable, aren’t core to Walmart’s strategy, nor do they involve the kind of hard choices that we’re trying to examine at the conference this year.

Strategic social impact and shared value:
So what counts as strategic? Porter’s framework points us at decisions that have societal benefits, but are also key to providing competitive advantage to the firm or ensuring a positive industry environment. For example, in 2009 Walmart lobbied for laws mandating employer-provided health insurance. In an environment where every retailer provides health insurance, Walmart’s employees and customers are better off (social impact), but Walmart is also better able to bear the increased cost, increasing its competitive advantage. As another example, in
2006 Walmart began a process of requiring all its seafood to be sustainably sourced, thus helping to ensure fish remain relatively abundant and thus available and affordable for its customers. In another case, Walmart worked with its vendors to recycle plastic and cardboard waste from stores into an exclusive line of pet products, thereby cutting disposal costs and creating unique, lower-cost products.

Learn about other ways companies can strategically share value at our panel at 2 PM this Thursday!
- Kaia Dekker, for the Social Impact as Strategy Panel

Driving Change in the Energy Sector Update!

Hi all!

Today I wanted to increase your awareness of the energy panel within the Business & Society Conference, titled Driving Change in the Energy Sector.

The energy community at Tuck gets bigger and bigger each year, and we are excited to see companies as PG&E, General Electric, Enernoc, Siemens, FirstWind, Eaton, O-Power or SunEdison looking for Tuckies. As a consequence, we wanted to have a panel in the conference that dealt with the latest happenings in the energy world and its perspectives.

We thought that the best way to have a real perspective of these happenings would be to bring together all the players in the industry: equipment manufacturers, investors, utilities and nonprofit. And I have to say that the caliber of the professionals that are going to be present in the conference is astonishing. Seth Dunn, the renewables policy leader at GE Energy, will provide the perspective of one of the biggest manufacturers of wind turbines and solar panels in the world. Daniel Hullah, from RockPort Capital, will provide first hand insights about investing in new technologies. Sienna Rogers, from Pacific Gas & Electricity, will bring to the table what
a large utility thinks about investing in renewables and what are the challenges they face at the time of doing so. Finally, Armond Cohen, from Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit devoted to increase air quality , will moderate the table with the freedom needed to get insightful answers from the panel.

The panel will discuss issues as relevant as the role of distributed generation in the future of renewables, the impact of shale gas on its price competitiveness, its subsidy dependency, the role of China in its development, or what are the next technologies in the R&D pipeline.

I hope to see you all there!
Remember to register at http://tuck2012bsc.eventbrite.com/

Energy Panel

Healthcare Panel Update

I hope everyone is getting excited for the Business & Society’s Healthcare panel! Dartmouth’s
President Kim has even cleared his calendar to come moderate this panel which is full of industry experts representing a wide range of backgrounds and opinions. Panelists will include Dr. Jaime Bayona who helps run Dartmouth’s Center for Health Care Delivery Science, Dr. Paul Chew the current Chief Medical Officer at Sanofi U.S., Dr. Vas Narasimhan who was recently promoted to
run Novartis’s global vaccine development, and Dr. Derek Yach the conference’s Keynote speaker and Senior Vice President of Global Health and Agriculture Policy at PepsiCo.

What really strikes me as I look at the panelists are their in-depth experiences at different places in the health care system. Dr. Bayona fought to get medicine to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis patients in Peru while he headed up Partners in Health, Peru. At the same time, Dr. Narasimhan was busy getting Menveo, a vaccine for meningitis, approved by the FDA and into doctors’ offices. If we are going to learn anything about how to make health care equitable and how to effectively deliver care to those who need it most, this is the group to teach us!

Following the panel, there will also be an opportunity to meet more personally in small groups with many of the panelists as well as Dr. Srishti Gupta, one of McKinsey & Company’s Global Health experts. It will be a great chance to get to know some of the people who have dedicated their lives to improving health care and are making a difference every day.

Mark your calendar for 10:00AM on Friday February 10th, I am looking forward to seeing you there.