The Business4Health Compact to lead change on the ground

     The Business4Health Compact, with the MWP Think Tanks, the web-portal and its supporting innovation, education and policy units, is conceived in an organic manner to drive change on the ground with sufficient scale, scope and speed, at local, national and global levels. The Think Tanks and pre-think tank convergence workshops are designed to seed, develop and scale up such action. Based on a model introduced by respected business strategist C.K. Prahalad at the 2008 MWP-Gates Foundation workshop “From crisis to convergence: Green Revolution 2.5,” the Business4Health Compact’s paradigm embodies convergence principles and networks of networks of innovation architects on the ground. Each of these convergence networks is formed to invest in specific concrete, achievable, sustainable, and scalable goals that promote health and economic convergence toward health and wealth for all. Members of convergence networks can take different organizational models to reach business goals that apply social, environmental, and economic standards to new ideas in a way that reconcile conflicts and synergies.

     The Business4Health Compact will build upon the UN Global Compact, an innovative strategic policy framework designed to “help advance sustainable business models and markets in order to contribute to the initiative's overarching mission of helping to build a more sustainable and inclusive global economy.” The Business4Health Compact proposes to scale up what the UN Global Compact can achieve by using the MWP Think Tanks, in conjunction with the MWP transdisciplinary, multi-sector and multi-level networks of leaders in science, policy, action and education. Taken from the starting point that the power of business can be harnessed to the benefit of ‘health and wealth for all’, the Business4Health Compact for the inaugural program will push the boundaries of corporate social responsibility to build upon development in social businesses and other creative and inclusive models of capitalism and beyond. It will also gather convergence networks of actors from business, policy and health to drive innovation, education and social change at local, national, and/or global levels, each network being organized around a focused, concrete and achievable social and/or economic goal that promotes health and wealth for all.