Mark Kramer, Founder and Managing Director of FSG recently announced a new executive education course on creating shared value to be offered at Harvard Business School, December 10-12, 2014. This is the first time that he and fellow ‘Creating Shared Value’ co-founder Professor Michael Porter—along with other Harvard faculty—will develop and teach a 2 ½ day course on this topic. The course is intended for senior corporate executives in strategy, operations, and new business development, as well as select leaders from NGOs and government.
This innovative new strategy program brings together senior business leaders to examine strategies for addressing society’s challenges through profitable business models. The curriculum features HBS-style case discussions, guest protagonists, and concept presentations that explore shared value concepts, applications, and implementations.
This program examines shared value strategies at four levels:
- Designing a shared value strategy
- Building social purpose into the corporate mission
- Implementing shared value across the organisation
- Making the shared value case to investors
While the course is a milestone in itself, it’s also given Mark and Michael the opportunity to write a new set of teaching cases on shared value which will be distributed through the Harvard system and to other business schools. The initial set of cases will include Dow Chemical, Walmart, and the Norwegian fertiliser company Yara as examples of shared value at the product, value chain and cluster levels, respectively. They will also develop cases on Novartis in India, Novo Nordisk in China, and Discovery Health in South Africa as more comprehensive examples of shared value that cut across all three levels. As you read this, the case writing team from Harvard is flying around the world to conduct on-site interviews in Michigan, Arkansas, Norway, Tanzania, Denmark, India and South Africa, which they will supplement with videos and photographs that bring the cases to life. The course will be filmed and archived at the Business School.
Developing these six teaching cases is the first step in the development of a full course curriculum on shared value to be offered at Harvard and, with hope, at leading business schools around the world.
Click here to read Mark Kramer’s announcement.
Click here or more information on the Harvard Business School course and to complete an application.
