Technologies applications (IoT, Metaverse, and many more to come) are evolving at exponential speed. Yet the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems are far away from being solved. The vision of rotary is to catalyze economic forces in the territory to bring business and society back together. To make that encounter possible, we must overcome a pure “social responsibility” mindset in which social issues are at the periphery, not the core of value creation.
This vision is backed up by the literature on the subject. Harvard’s professor Michael Porter, who conceptualized “Shared Value” says: “The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges”. In other words, social Issues can be tackled with profitable business models, and the value creation can fuel resolution of the root-cause problems on large scale.