INCUBATOR OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS (INSTEAD OF PRODUCT VENTURES)

I just read about Virgance on Worldchanging’s write-up and insights from the Sustainable Brands International Conference, just past this June in Monterey.  Virgance is truly an icon of Service Thinking and Post Consumerism: a business incubator set-up not to establish highly branded consumer products, but instead to focus on companies whose product is “good” and to create value from movements and collaborative business models. Virgance is a business that creates ventures that create value through social movements and networks. It used to be that producing a beautifully designed product and selling social (product) status was a route to both success and fame (think Apple, Method, One Laptop Per Child, Toyota Prius an on..); today, there are emerging markets which value by building community and creating change.

In their words:

“Some companies make car stereos or scented candles or frozen tater tots. But how might a company produce “positive social change… What if activism is an emerging market? If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits? What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”

These are the guys behind Carrotmob, which does the opposite of boycotting and instead brings together “mobs” of shoppers that influence socially responsible purchasing by literally mobbing areas and being loyal to these type of businesses. It’s a bit like the IKEA sale, but driven not by cheap furniture and cut prices but instead by social values and sustainability. And also One Block Off The Grid, with the tagline “Consumer power meets solar power”. IBOG brings groups of consumers together who want to get solar energy and reduces the cost. This is something we talked about at live|work forever, with ourselves and to our clients (some of whom were energy companies), but we never did make it happen. At OZOlab, also a business incubator for sustainable ventures, we applied service thinking and service models to our consumr product businesses, (such as a cleaning product that was actually a refil service system), but we were never as pioneering as to drive a wholly new paradigm of value creation. Our investors would not have understood it.

A big shout out to Virgance for truly seeing that the world needs new types of business models and ways of building brands, which do not emphasis the need to OWN something pretty. There is money to be made in community, movements and collaborative business models.

Source: Tamara Giltsoff, Sustainability Strategist and Innovation leader