#1. Values: One of the most important questions we have to ask is whether social business implies new social values. Earlier this year in an article called Creating Shared Value Michael Porter and Mark Kramer asked if business needs to redefine its place in society:
#2. Bottom of the pyramid: Social business originates in bottom of the pyramid activities. It describes business systems that alleviate poverty through entrepreneurism
#3. P2P. Social business is the first P2P platform and all the P2P economics that have followed it, from Napster to eBay to companies like Eventbrite and AirBnB. These are platforms that enable other people to do business with each other.
#4. Communications. Social business is an extension of social media and really means improved communications between companies, customers and employees.
#5. Data. Social business is about the accumulation and use of data from online browsing, generated from new standards like the Open Graph.
#6. Crowd or collective intelligence and action. Social business is really crowdsourcing solutions to intractable problems and ranges fromInnocentive’s science and business challenges to reporting pothole in urban areas ideation programs inside large companies.
#7. CSR. Social business is CSR and any kind of business set up to pursue cause-related objectives or a business that gravitates towards social objectives or causes.
# 8 Business Ecosystems. Ecosystems come in a variety of forms: developer ecosystems, ideas ecosystems, customer ecosystems. What defines them is their contribution to productive enterprise – i.e. they are more than community. Business ecosystems interact in ways that create wealth.
