Purpose-driven businesses are widely acknowledged as outperforming their peers, a 2025 study by PwC found purpose-driven family businesses outperformed similar counterparts by 10 percentage points.
But how do leading businesses that integrate purpose and profit implement this in practice?
And what are the concrete strategies that other organisations can employ?
Drawing on our experience of over a decade of supporting leading corporate social innovators and utilising open-source resources to share best practice, Yunus Social Innovation (YSI) provides practical methods and pathways for businesses to put purpose into practice and drive social impact as part of their operations.
Here’s how.
Defining corporate social innovation
Before implementing strategies and action plans, corporate leaders and decision-makers need to have a clear understanding of the innovation landscape within their own organisation.
This starts by asking three questions:
- What is our innovation goal?
- Where does our innovation potential lie?
- Do we have a culture of innovation?
The answers to these questions will form a roadmap for the organisation and innovation leaders in selecting the innovation strategies and methods that best apply to them.
Make v buy
Just like other forms of innovation, corporate social innovation can come from within, or it can be pursued through partnerships and collaborations with external organisations.
This is the classic, make v buy decision-making matrix, however, it comes with its own considerations when applied to social innovation.
Make: Innovation from within
Many organisations already have the spark of social innovation within their teams and functions, and the task is about creating the conditions for that to thrive. In this case, the focus is on empowering employees, creating frameworks for action and executing innovation activities from ideation to market implementation.
Buy: Unlocking the power of partnerships
Sometimes the best inspiration comes from outside. Organisations can leverage the innovative capabilities of entrepreneurs, start-ups and initiatives to complement or collaborate with their own, in-house capabilities. In this scenario, the focus is on identifying the correct partner from a wide market and ensuring the structure of the collaboration enables the innovation to take root in the buying organisation and achieve its intended outcome.
With the roadmap in hand and the method of engagement established, decision-makers can take the next steps towards implementation, by identifying the practical strategies that they wish to pursue. Depending on the company context and innovation goal, organisations can adopt a range of proven methods to their own ends. These include: social procurement, mentoring and knowledge academies, investing and financial partnerships, corporate incubators and accelerators, and empowering internal innovators or intrapreneurs.
Social procurement
Social procurement is a powerful lever for organisations to drive impact at scale. On average, 60 per cent of a company’s ESG footprint rests within its value chain. Procurement budgets worldwide amount to trillions of dollars, which means that even a small amount spent with social business, when repeated across the economy, can achieve outsized impact.
With increased focus on companies’ supply chains as locations for disruption, adopting social practices in purchasing decisions can also shift the conversation from risk mitigation to positive impact, driving long term resilience.
Putting this into practice requires establishing procurement goals, identifying potential categories, setting the governance framework, implementing policies, procedures and resources and deploying an impact measurement and management (IMM) structure to ensure accountability and drive program improvements.
Find out more: https://ysi.global/services/innovation-collaboration/
Mentoring and knowledge academies
The human capability held inside an organisation is one of the most valuable assets to drive innovation. These can be delivered through structured mentoring or pro-bono service relationships with social enterprises and social businesses.
Established mentoring relationships and knowledge academies can not only create a stronger employee brand, driving retention and reducing employee turnover, but also inculcate new ways of thinking and problem solving. These can be adapted to internal tasks, creating the spark for internal innovation or the foundation for inter-organisational partnerships.
Find out more: https://ysi.global/cases/unusual-partners/
Investing and financial partnerships
Financial partnerships between corporations and social enterprises can provide benefits for both parties. Whether structured as investments or loans, when combined with strategic advice this can add to an organisation’s network of ecosystem partners and suppliers. A range of structures are available to organisations to make this happen, including direct investments as well as joint investments or collaborative engagement with existing funds.
Find out more: https://ysi.global/services/innovation-collaboration/
Incubators and accelerators
Combining theoretical and hands-on learning at various stages of enterprise growth, targeted accelerators and incubators can lead to the development of a pipeline of product and service innovation that are closely adaptable to a company’s existing processes. Including internal experts can also combine the benefits of a mentoring relationship within a targeted business concept, solving a key practical challenge for the entrepreneur.
Find out more: https://ysi.global/cases/reckitt-catalyst/
Intrapreneurs
Some of the greatest, long-term impact on a business and its operations can occur through corporate social intrapreneurship. This can occur across a number of trajectories, including through new revenue streams, finding cost savings and strengthening the employee brand.
On a practical level, intrapreneurship can take place in creating innovations from scratch or through transforming internal structures, creating connections between business operations that would not have existed otherwise. Critically, this style of innovation cannot occur alone, but needs to have the support of wider business structures to connect departments and functions and have the institutional shielding to trial and test initiatives that may lead to fruition or could be the starting point for the next idea.
Find out more: https://ysi.global/cases/unusual-pioneers/
Corporation social innovation: Unlocking the next
Unlocking the potential of corporate social innovation to support and transform business and organisational structures requires courage and the openness to change. While each organisation’s pathway will be unique, there exist roadmaps and examples to implement this and network of support through the process. Meanwhile, a shared goal can retain focus, even as individual initiatives hit roadblock or face challenges. Implementation, in practice, will always vary from the plan at the outset, but by remaining agile, businesses and organisations can come closer to achieving a model where profit and purpose are aligned, supporting communities, organisations and individuals.
To find out more about corporate social innovation, click here: https://ysi.global/
These insights were adapted from the Unusual Partners platform, a joint initiative of Yunus Social Innovation, Porticus Foundation and SAP to make social innovation open to a wider audience. To discover more, click here: https://unusual.partners/.
