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The purpose ecosystem is coming of age. You can see this when you start coming across academic research defining it and studying its potential and constraints, when you watch it come to fruition through your or others’ deliberate efforts, or when over 100 CEOs of purpose-driven companies endorse a Call to Purpose.
Academics studying this purpose-ecosystem phenomenon describe it as a self-organizing community of organizations and interdependent stakeholders organically seeking to promote wider system change through a shared intention to enable business to have a purpose beyond profit (Dahlmann et al and Lyon et al).
In Canada, my defining moment was in November 2021 when I co-moderated the United Way BC Social Purpose Institute’s first-ever national dialogue in a summit on social-purpose business. The Propelling Purpose Summit: The Road to the Purposeful Economy brought together the emergent purpose ecosystem and introduced the “purpose economy” narrative to Canada. (We postulated that if a business can have a social purpose, the economy should, too!) The summit named and consulted the social-purpose community on the levers of change that should be mobilized to accelerate the take-up of social purpose in business. The Canadian Social Purpose Ecosystem Map was created to find and connect the purpose ecosystem players.
This groundbreaking event launched the concept of the purpose economy and sowed the seeds for the creation of the Canadian Purpose Economy Project (CPEP).
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