November 2023 White Paper

As businesses, governments and researchers grapple with the need to measure stakeholder impacts beyond shareholders, each faces the unique challenge of matching their intention to measure these truly with the complexities of doing so.  In previous white papers from the Value Research Center, we have outlined an underlying philosophy from Japan as well as an approach built upon this philosophy to measure such impacts across seven key stakeholder groups, including (1) the business itself, (2) its customers, (3) employees, (4) partners, (5) shareholders, (6) society and (7) the planet.  This white paper, now outlines three key aspects of our current work within the Value Research Center, including:

 

1. The clarification of value measurement, its elements and mindset required for effectively implementing such an approach with inspiration from Japan.

2. An outline of the detailed quality assurance (QA) process that we have now completed, integrating more than 40 sustainability standards, frameworks and models that comprise more than 1,200 individual impact measurements into a comprehensive Value Model for measuring stakeholder impacts across a company’s operations.

3. A case example of how the Value Model can be applied not only to individual company sustainability strategy efforts, but here we introduce the Value Model as a “health check” system that can assess the breadth and depth of any business’s sustainability reporting initiatives based on their public disclosures.  While we have conducted a number of these “health checks” for different companies in Japan and globally, here we introduce one application to Natura & Co for illustration purposes.