Rich Hutchinson
Managing Director & Senior Partner; Social Impact Practice Leader
Atlanta
Now more than ever, businesses must serve all stakeholders—customers, employees, society, and investors—alike. At BCG, we believe in the power of business and capital to be forces for good. We work with our clients to analyze their core business models, capabilities, and operations to create positive economic, social, and environmental impact in ways that are profitable for the long term.
We achieve our greatest societal impact in collaboration with our clients. By maximizing the impact of these cooperative efforts, we accomplish far more than we ever could alone. Partnership is at the heart of our social impact approach, and it is key to tackling complex social and environmental challenges. We seek to maximize our own social impact by enriching and expanding our partnerships, fostering system-level coalitions, and establishing social impact and sustainability as core competencies that are woven into business strategies and thus yield quantifiable returns.
Our social impact consulting drives major initiatives across a broad spectrum of global challenges to shape a better future. Our work is closely aligned with addressing and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In this time of accelerating systematic change, customers, employees, and investors increasingly demand that organizations act in socially aware and sustainable ways and demonstrate that they are doing so. It is necessary, strategic, and profitable for organizations to have a positive social impact. We help organizations to plan, implement, assess, and communicate their social impact and sustainability initiatives. Examples of our social impact work include:
Transformative global change for the better is clearly possible. Driving such change is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Companies can do well by doing good. For instance, biopharma companies that conduct ethical human clinical trials and expand access to medications have margins that are 6.7 percentage points higher, and valuations that are 12% greater, than the average for the industry.
We partner with leading organizations to mobilize shared expertise and to develop their organizational strengths toward solving some of the world's most pressing challenges.
At BCG, we are developing a rigorous approach to solving the world's toughest challenges. Our theory of change holds that we can drive change directly—by implementing profitable solutions and incentivizing solutions that are not profitable—and enable change indirectly—by directing capital and shaping ecosystems to encourage innovation.
Sonya Hoo and Shalini Unnikrishnan discuss how we have applied our theory of change to foster digital transformation in agriculture and innovation in plastics recycling.
We are putting the power of BCG to work in order to make a difference in the world.
No one organization or sector can succeed at solving the complex societal challenges we face today. Reaching the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals requires collaboration across the public, private, and social sectors.
Combating climate change is one of humanity’s defining challenges of the 2020s. BCG’s Center for Climate & Sustainability partners with businesses and governments to help them prepare for a decarbonized world, supporting them as they drive technological and economic transformations and realize competitive advantage in a low-carbon economy.
Reducing exposure among those who are vulnerable to adverse health outcomes will benefit the healthy, the economically vulnerable, and society overall.
BCG on Social Impact
Follow BCG on Social Impact on LinkedIn to explore how organizations are advancing the SDGs and how the growth of your business can benefit society.
