Ashoka's Changemaker Economy

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Source: Ashoka

Ashoka's Changemaker Economy is a strategy for mobilizing teams that engage people across the business, social, and government sectors to provide the systems-changing leadership and organization needed to achieve an economy where value and opportunity is created for all.

In order to achieve a vision of a Changemaker Economy that creates value for all at scale, Ashoka is working on three levels:

  1. Ashoka works with individual companies, supporting them with insights and experiences that help them see and adapt to the new strategic environment of an Everyone a Changemaker World, in order to mainstream the Changemaker Corporation model. Ashoka offers a suite of engagements to work with corporations to develop their capacity as system change companies across three main pillars by:

    1. Supporting social innovations, and gaining a deep understanding and insights about how they relate to business challenges. Spotting new business opportunities based on the field-based experiences of social entrepreneurs.
    2. Growing changemaker talents: intrapreneurial, empathetic and collaborative. Adopting new leadership styles that enable co-creation with other key players.
    3. Social and business co-creation: imagining and developing new products and services hand-in-hand with social entrepreneurs and other key partners to address key societal needs and strengthen business ecosystems.
  2. Ashoka facilitates the formation of teams of teams that reimagine entire industries and increase value creation for all, thereby accelerating the formation of an industry that can create hybrid social and business value at scale. Ashoka offers Hybrid Value Systems Accelerators to galvanize the formation of teams of teams that create value while solving the world’s toughest problems:

    1. They start by identifying and selecting a small core group of pioneers/innovators across sectors to explore new ways to solve a complex social issue, e.g., nutrition for all.
    2. This team is galvanized with a new mindset and vision through conversations in which participants are able to sense the full extent of the opportunity as well as the new competencies and organizational models they will need to realize it.
    3. The Hybrid Value Systems are activated by igniting a process of prototyping and refining solutions throughout the hybrid value system through collaborative entrepreneurship.
    4. Finally, this becomes the new norm for organizing that powers the formation of constantly evolving hybrid value systems through the spread of a new mindset, structures and practices.
  3. Ashoka works at a systems-level to tip the management industry to a new framework for organization and leadership. This process of mainstreaming a new way to organize is modeled on Ashoka's past and current efforts to create paradigm shifts:

    1. Select and connect a core community of management innovators who are pioneers of this new way of thinking and are already demonstrating the new norm. They include leading business and social entrepreneurs (including Ashoka Fellows), management consultants, academic changemakers, and thought leaders who are developing solutions that enable teams of entrepreneurs and changemakers to transform industries for growth and impact through hybrid value systems. Jointly create a collaborative effort to realize a shared vision, and catalyze a magnetic force that attracts others leaders to join in taking action.
    2. Engage institutions and networks that can mainstream new capacities, at both the individual and organizational level around the world. Build partnerships with leading and visionary corporations and other types of organizations in the management industry that allow them to adopt new internal practices so they can engage in creating hybrid value systems, scaling-up social innovations and business value. Co-create research and innovation, triggering a market for a rapid shift in mindset, skills, and organizing structure across institutions. Develop and spread tools and practical knowledge that enable others to build their own adaptations of Hybrid Value System applications.
    3. Accelerate the shift in conversation and management teaching by engaging those who lead with thought and voice, and by reinforcing the voices of innovators on the front lines to shape this emerging new world. Engage publishers (both traditional and platform-based), leading business schools and executive training programs, leading universities, and management innovators to catalyze new offerings that convey the power of the new way of organizing.