juditboros

Purpose driven economy

Joey Reiman’s The Story of Purpose gives a methodology for building purpose-powered businesses. He states that mission defines what your company does. By formulating a vision you point out where it’s going. But the purpose is “solely” about why it exists. Purpose is the positive impact your company makes in the world, it is the reason for being. It is not CSR, it’s about how you operate in order to make money. We wanted to see, what does our Meetup community think about purpose-driven business models, is it possible to base business decisions on whether or not they are in accordance with the company’s purpose?

Participants

We contacted local entrepreneurs and organizations who we believed had started their operations from a purpose point-of-view (even if they were not necessarily aware of that). 6 companies agreed to be our guinea pigs and work with us; TrainedOn (building a collaboration planning tool), CókMók (supporting children in foster care), Kantaa by Cargomania (self organized bike messenger and delivery company), Dori Tomcsanyi (fashion designer), FöFi (children’s product concept by Nora Nardai), LogIQube (creating visuospatial games for kids).

Methodology

Together with them, we analyzed their business models, dug deep in their product or service proposition to find the very core purpose they had when they started their businesses. We used the “story and purpose” driven business canvas by the Happy Startup School to map their mission, main motivation and working model. These pre-filled canvases gave the basis of the Meetup activities. The main point of the exercise was to see how the companies can or cannot connect to their customers (played by the Meetup audience) through their original business motives.

Conclusions/Output

The main point of the exercise was to see how the companies can or cannot connect to their customers (played by the Meetup audience) through their original business motives. Without going into details of each company’s pain or struggles, in general we can say that indeed it was a very useful exercise for them to see why are they doing the things they are doing. Some of them understood they are currently developing a product for a different audience than they originally started, without necessarily adjusting the core values and messages for them (obviously they knew this already, still didn’t step out of the product development mode to work on this, too). Some of them realized that for their core purpose, the current product offer is not really relevant and could be changed (possibly to make more money and getting closer to the original purpose at the same time).

Contributors

BLD team: Judit Boros, Tamas Turi, Kata Gyarmati, Zoltan Havasi, Anna Kadar, Reni Varga, Balazs Szaday, Eszter Altmann, Eszter Hídvégi