The way that we’ve been thinking over the past 25 years about corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a lightning rod for controversy. With shocking speed, our framework for CSR has slid into the background. Yet underneath the surface, many business leaders continue to find extraordinary value in pursuing solutions to complicated public problems. There is momentum accumulating for a new movement for supporting corporations and other private-sector actors in engaging with the public interest.

Leaders want to be smart about this. They want to learn from the past. They want to engage new technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), to make things happen at scale and on a much faster timetable than tended to occur under the old CSR framework. They don’t want to argue about woke-anti-woke polarization. They want collaborative action focused on what’s important.

About a year ago, I began a project called The Pi-Squared Initiative (Pi2) to support private-sector leaders at all levels in becoming smarter, better and more effective in working with governments to solve public problems in cities, states and provinces, federal agencies and international agencies. The initiative has been sponsored by the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University.

To date we have produced over 100 Pi2 podcast segments where I interview top-tier scholars and practitioners about issues surrounding the future of CSR. In this article I will share some of the key takeaways that have emerged from this initiative.

A brief and incomplete history of CSR

When I was an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School in the early 1980s, we didn’t talk about CSR. Instead, we discussed ideas that were at least in part grounded in Milton Friedman’s (often misinterpreted) 1970 opinion piece in the New York Times titled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits.”

Friedman’s main idea was that the primary responsibility of the executive in a corporation is to fulfill responsibilities to the shareholders who have hired the executive as an agent of their interests. Friedman argued that the pursuit of philanthropy — i.e. of social aims and responsibilities — was a personal matter rather than a responsibility of the executive. Investors, as stockholders, could direct their monies outside the firm into social causes aligned with their personal beliefs.

What was not confronted in this argument was the fact that the value created by a corporation often impinges on social outcomes. At the time, the main concern for society was pollution, and it was viewed as an issue for government. The thinking was that organizations in different sectors solved different problems: The government set regulatory guardrails on acceptable behaviour, companies pursued profits, and charities focused on pro-social philanthropic aims.

In the 1980s and 1990s, this view gave way to acknowledgement that the problems in each sector were intertwined. Concerns were raised about ‘regulatory capture,’ which happens when a government’s agenda is overtaken by companies. Questions arose about access to opportunities for employment and more broadly, the discrimination — particularly against women — that characterized high finance and the culture of hierarchical corporations.

The complexity of these and subsequent developments is worth investigating more fully, but in the interests of succinctness, let me move forward to the early 2000s, when longstanding ideas began to emerge into the mainstream regarding ‘shared value,’ the so-called corporate license to operate, and firm obligations to employees, customers and communities. The CSR movement was grounded in these concepts.

Over time, stakeholder analysis incorporated a wide range of ideas, including those that were eventually grouped together as an agenda for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Continuing conversations arose on how DEI initiatives could unlock value for companies as well as remediate intolerable historical injustices in access to opportunity. Corporate responsibility meant accountability both for current and historical problems in an organization’s areas of activity.

By the mid 2020s, the CSR agenda had expanded and developed to engage more fully with the central value-creating activities of the corporation. Many CSR advocates focused on opening new markets that had previously been underserved, and we often focused on the merits and problems associated with pursuing the ‘business case’ for CSR. Scholars and policymakers became interested in different governance arrangements such as B-Corporations and ‘private ordering,’ through which companies cultivate the development of business ecosystems in emerging markets.

The range and scope of ideas incorporated into the mainstream of business thinking and the curriculum of business schools was legitimized by the adoption in 2019 by 181 highprofile CEO signatories to the statement that “The Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans’.” This statement identified customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders as a corporation’s primary stakeholders. Despite no mention of the idea that value creation for stakeholders was in conflict with value creation for stockholders (indeed, shareholders are on the list of stakeholders), a backlash began to develop, particularly against the idea that companies should focus on the needs of communities as a primary constituency. This arose in part from discomfort with the idea that firms should engage in diffuse community philanthropy that could be untethered to the corporation’s purpose.

During the early 2020s, scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines were debating these issues when the ideas hit a political flashpoint. The origins of politicization are beyond the scope of this article, but there is no question that job quality, the pandemic, the U.S. presidential election, developments in Europe, immigration, the legitimacy of universities and other issues have intersected with the CSR agenda to discredit its relevance and even make dangerous its pursuit.

The broad challenge

We now have multiple systemic problems for which we cannot identify unique causal agents. Where systems are concerned, everybody and nobody is at fault. And yet we must move forward and decipher how companies and other organizations can create value that addresses the public interest.

A year into the Pi2 initiative, one of the ideas that has struck me most deeply is the point that the most significant public problems of our time are both public and private at the same time, with engagement from all sectors in their emergence and in their potential resolution. Pi2 experts generally elevate compassion, creativity, authenticity and friendship among motivated individuals working across sectors as the lynchpin to getting something important done in the public interest. Hence another key insight from Pi2 centres on the power of small groups of people, often friends working in different sectors with different skills, who focus on an opportunity for creating major amounts of value by improving a critical element of an established system on a timeframe of a few years.

For example, think of the 20 per cent of deaths averted in Malawi’s HIV clinics through the implementation of an electronic medical record system. This initiative was spawned by a group of engineers working in a non-profit organization that presented their idea to the Malawian government’s Ministry of Health, which engaged with private-sector donors to get equipment from a failing company and with the local cellphone provider (a for-profit company) for communications connectivity.

Another example is the Greater Boston Food Bank, which works with agencies in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to provide support to a wide range of municipalities by distributing food contributed by large corporations through sophisticated private supply chains.

There are numerous examples in the series in which highly motivated individuals collaborate to demonstrate the potential for value creation, and then coax, persuade and cajole the organizations for which they work to get engaged. The focus is not on public-private partnership so much as on solving public problems in terms that reflect reality on the ground.

What matters, our experts agree, is a relentless, consummate commitment to create value for the underserved by introducing a solution to a well-known problem that is so embedded systemically that it takes a big effort to induce change (such as changing a medical records system, for example). But once that happens, a domino effect ensues and the rollout of a lot of value at scale through either or both the public and private sector can begin.

The agenda for change I am describing doesn’t originate from a formal CSR initiative. It starts with coordination between people who see the same problem from different vantage points, and who find a way to pilot their idea, learn, improve and then build undeniable evidence for moving an idea to scale. Today, many projects along these lines are emerging to improve work-flows through the introduction of AI-based protocols. What keeps people going through the process of change is their camaraderie and commitment to purpose. All big problems are viewed as both public and private at the same time.

Some key insights

Collectively, Pi2 conversations reflect that the processes for innovation within corporations and governments are often out of alignment with opportunities for meaningful change. There is a lot to consider, but we can begin by acknowledging that governments are designed for equal treatment, transparency and accountability rather than experimentation with new technologies. For different reasons, large corporations are often siloed in ways that make experimentation difficult. In contrast, NGOs and small companies are often good at experimentation with technology but not at scaling.

Going forward, what we need is for small groups of individuals — often acting in ways that are outside their formal job descriptions — to identify change opportunities with the potential for creating great value for broad constituencies that may be underserved. In the educational system in Nicaragua, for example, innovation in the curriculum has been limited both by workload demands and government-approved guidelines. When an NGO offering after-school programs identified and refined ways to teach that resonated with schoolchildren in one community, teachers responded first by learning of the innovation and then by advocating for it with governmental authorities. Rollout followed from the proof of concept.

This pattern prevails in other contexts, as well. It involves delaying the scaling of an innovation until evidence is developed to overcome the objections of skeptics. The goal is to start by proving that value can be created for an important target group — and to do this through a pilot that is pulled off at low cost and without drawing the attention of those that might seek to squash it. By building evidence of the potential opportunity in advance of attracting attention, the leaders of the effort generate support for creating value in advance of the inevitable disruptions that arise to established ways of doing things. The goal is to develop a well-baked response to skepticism about what is possible in advance of resistance to change.

Once the evidence accumulates for creating public value through an innovation, then a plan for scaling can develop successfully. At this stage, NGOs may seek to turn over control of the project to a governmental authority with the power to implement widely, such as when the developers of Malawi’s electronic medical record system conveyed it to the Ministry of Health for implementation in HIV clinics. By the time the hand-off occurred, skepticism had faded and the demand for the rollout was extensive. Similarly, a large corporation may seek to acquire a proven prototype for an innovation that is proven to create public value through a pilot project that is organized for proof of concept rather than scale. This often happens, for example, after groups of enterprising students set up entrepreneurial organizations to launch application software as a prospective solution to a large problem.

A strong contrast between this model and the former approach to CSR is in the orientation around problem-solving rather than around the deployment of a corporation’s excess resources in some way that might help a community. Stakeholder engagement is more than consultation. It involves deep engagement over time in mutual work. Relationships develop. Learning occurs on all sides. The scaled approach is collaboratively designed rather than conveyed in an imperious way from an organization to a stakeholder group.

Sectoral insights: energy and healthcare

The conversations in this series centre on several sectors where opportunities for acting in the public interest are especially important, but central among these are energy and healthcare.

Pi2’s scholars and innovators describe the imminent increase in demand for electricity that will arise with data-centre deployments to support AI, the development of emerging markets, and growth in cities. Already, many companies and governmental actors have established systems for working together towards electrification supported by renewables. What is needed is to amplify these collaborations while, at the same time, developing approaches for accelerating progress. Public support must be cultivated through advocacy, media coverage and cultural supports. This will require a great deal of mutual commitment.

In healthcare, the challenges are somewhat different. Resistance to change is often grounded in concerns about the quality of patient care. These can be amplified by commitments to specializations that compete for resources, attention and status. At the same time, the commitments of healthcare professionals, including administrators, to patient care have compelled important innovations. Many organizations have committed to AI adoption that improves administrative workflow, improves inter-specialty collaboration and accelerates early diagnoses. Predominantly, AI innovations that involve machine-read diagnostics often also require human involvement. The prospect of organizational streamlining is complicated by the finding that organizational differences in achieving patient outcomes tend to persist quite strongly over time, which suggests that the DNA of high-performing organizations matters a great deal and is well worth preserving.

Medicine development in the pharmaceutical sector has been influenced profoundly by AI and other tools that enable scientists to analyze potential compounds and therapies. This includes biologics, which are large and complicated compared to many specialized medicines developed in laboratories. A number of Pi2 conversations focus on the ways in which the expertise of scientists in specific disease areas depends on the incentives created by public policies such as patent protections. The sharing of knowledge, scientist rotations across sectors and scientific collaborations across borders are affected by public policy directed at creating incentives for companies to develop medicines. Because scientific discovery is a highly uncertain creative process, the design of both public and private institutions has profound implications for outcomes.

Several major themes have arisen: First, that the public sector often procures private services as a buyer, and influences companies directly through the purchasing process. Second, individual employees often take rotations across sectors, and bring their insights with them when they move through different organizations. Third, the relationships that develop between individuals engaged across sectors are critical to the learning that informs implementation of innovations. Often specific individuals participate in multiple sectors simultaneously, such as when an employee of a private corporation holds a political office, or when an employee volunteers in an NGO.

Each of these themes reinforces the idea that corporate social responsibility as a mandate did not address the full range of ways that corporations engage with the public interest, much less the ways that the public interest is defined by and shaped by actors in the private sector. Project by project, we should think more broadly about fulfilling the public interest than only through companies, and we should deploy specific corporate capabilities where the strengths of the private sector are most relevant.

Entrepreneurship, science and AI

Entrepreneurship training is broken. By one estimate, more than 90 per cent of entrepreneurial ventures fail. There is a concern that promoting new-business formation by young people is risky and may not be in the public interest even in high-income settings. While evidence suggests that, in the U.S., the great preponderance of failed entrepreneurs find their footing over time, the human impact of failure may be significant. We often elevate expectations by teaching about CEO celebrities so intensively that we lead students into taking on the risks of failure without being fully prepared for the consequences.

The issues are perhaps even more concerning over entrepreneurship training in low-income countries, where local cultural norms are quite different than in North America and Europe, which is where much of the curriculum was developed. By teaching concepts such as the pursuit of competitive advantage to businesspeople embedded in cooperative cultures, the fabric of their relationships may be adversely affected. Exposure to theft can arise when entrepreneurs engage in recommended marketing activities that make public their financial successes. In the customary entrepreneurship class, the opportunity is not taken to develop understandings of new business models that reflect culturally different practices. These and other concerns suggest that a curriculum that celebrates corporate practices that are common in North America and Europe may not be as valuable as conceived. It may even be harmful.

Scholars in the series point to the critical importance of social interaction between scientists as essential to knowledge development. Innovations in the tools of science — such as statistical software, AI-based search algorithms, and computing power — can shape both the productivity of scientists and the direction of scientific discoveries. The relevance of various scientific disciplines to potential breakthroughs is sensitive to both the availability of the tools of science and to commercialization. Technology development has led to the concentration of wealth, particularly in the U.S., in only a handful of companies. Scientists’ willingness to innovate increasingly depends on understandings about who will profit. Companies that are creative and thoughtful about shaping incentives to support creativity in the public interest can motivate scientists to pursue stretch projects that ultimately cultivate prosperity in ways that profit their employers.

Pi2 contributors agree that AI is a great risk and opportunity. There is interest in the Pi2 community on AI as a tool that can amplify collaboration and improve communication, particularly between stakeholders and advocates of innovative business models. There is also awareness that AI does not perform consistently across cultural contexts when training data is over-indexed on westernized North American experiences, and that the risks of AI (such as bias, privacy breaches and hallucinations) are greater for marginalized and low-income persons. Pi2 contributors are concerned about whether and how AI can be deployed responsibly by organizations across all sectors—private and public. There is widespread interest in developing controls to address these challenges.

Where do we go from here?

What will it truly take for companies and non-profit organizations to engage with governmental actors to solve public problems? The first major theme that arose from these discussions is that trust must develop through longer-term conversations between leaders from different sectors. This takes time, because the foundations for taking action in the public and private sectors are so different. In the private sector, experimentation and learning are valued. Flexibility and pivoting are important. In the public sector, stability, transparency and accountability are valued. Equal treatment of citizens means that experiments are difficult to design and implement. Learning must occur before doing rather than by doing.

A second theme reflects the logic that leads to the engagement of the private sector in solving public problems in partnership with government. Why and when is it necessary to involve private-sector actors? Satisfactory answers to this question generally revolve around the expertise, capabilities, targeting, learning and ultimate scaling that can occur privately. Less-good answers generally involve access to money and/or particular individuals. Indeed, many of us overestimate the wealth of the private sector as compared to the enormous monetary resources and scale of the public sector. Overall, because collaboration across sectors is so costly and cumbersome, it’s important to make sure that the potential gains make the risks and costs worth incurring.

A third theme involves the importance of keeping the goals narrow so as to sustain engagement on both sides over time. Broad goals are a killer. Local, well-scoped impact projects that generate early ‘wins’ are often critical for building collaborations that last.

Corporate social responsibility is giving way to an agenda for private innovation in the public interest that is a ground-up reconceptualization that builds in some elements of the historical approach. For example, the idea that corporations can find value-creating opportunity in serving disenfranchised stakeholders continues to be important, but the way that this is accomplished is quite different than through centralized, top-down initiatives. What Pi2 experts emphasize is experimentation, pivoting and learning through mutual commitment and engagement before scaling begins.

Despite the recent suppression of DEI, many companies continue to find compelling opportunities in underserved markets. More than ever, organizations of all types are seeking authentic, long-term relationships with a range of stakeholders to cultivate the mutual learning and collaborative design that leads to successful outcomes for both the public and the company.

Moving forward, the goal is authentic fulfillment of important needs. It is the mandate of a new generation to do this with integrity and compassion. There is a new agenda for CSR: private innovation in the public interest.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of Rotman Management magazine.