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“I think we're going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people gettogether once in a while to protest, but it's more about an ongoing, sustained engagementin issues, networks and communities about which people care.”- Alex Steffen
ChainReact is about collaboratively generating, mapping, interpreting, and activating information about corporatenetworks and their impacts on society and the environment. The network approach is vital because withoutunderstanding the complex relationships involved in global supply chains, stakeholders cannot hold the companiesthey know accountable for the abuses – or the advances – of the many dependent companies they fuel.The greatest challenge to making corporate networks sustainable is that at present they are largely hidden.Even the most concerned companies and their stakeholders (investors, employees, customers) have limitedunderstanding of their network’s extended footprint in the world.
The fog of complex networks means small companies in remote jurisdictions can pollute and dump and abuse andneglect with the implicit support of indirect funding from companies further up the chain who may not even knowthey exist. This ugly pattern is clearly a problem for our society and environment, but it can also damagecompanies’ bottom lines. Without clear visibility of what happens throughout their supply chain, the companiesand their stakeholders are at increased reputational and legal risk, as scandals such as Rana Plaza fire have shown.For the fog to clear, it is not enough to make corporate networks visible; they must also be made understandable.Comprehensibility, too, is challenging because corporate networks are complex and can weave together controlnetworks (ownership, governance, etc), brand networks (franchises, consortia, etc.) and supplier networks (materialproviders, service providers, etc). Untangling these blends together data challenges, interface challenges, and, inplaces, philosophical challenges.
There is also a chicken-and-egg quality to the challenge of making corporate networks sustainable. On the onehand, there is often little incentive to gather data about the smaller companies at supplier networks’ edges, becausethe data are seen as worthless unless connected to brands familiar to western markets, and that requires networkmaps. But those who begin to work on network maps find that they are generally making connections betweenmore and more companies about which there is very little data.
Here is the deep value of the ChainReact proposal: by bringing together a savvy consortium to focus on threeplatforms at once, we can much more efficiently tackle a multi-faceted challenge that would defy a more piecemealapproach.
“I think we're going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people gettogether once in a while to protest, but it's more about an ongoing, sustained engagementin issues, networks and communities about which people care.”- Alex Steffen
ChainReact is about collaboratively generating, mapping, interpreting, and activating information about corporatenetworks and their impacts on society and the environment. The network approach is vital because withoutunderstanding the complex relationships involved in global supply chains, stakeholders cannot hold the companiesthey know accountable for the abuses – or the advances – of the many dependent companies they fuel.The greatest challenge to making corporate networks sustainable is that at present they are largely hidden.Even the most concerned companies and their stakeholders (investors, employees, customers) have limitedunderstanding of their network’s extended footprint in the world.
The fog of complex networks means small companies in remote jurisdictions can pollute and dump and abuse andneglect with the implicit support of indirect funding from companies further up the chain who may not even knowthey exist. This ugly pattern is clearly a problem for our society and environment, but it can also damagecompanies’ bottom lines. Without clear visibility of what happens throughout their supply chain, the companiesand their stakeholders are at increased reputational and legal risk, as scandals such as Rana Plaza fire have shown.For the fog to clear, it is not enough to make corporate networks visible; they must also be made understandable.Comprehensibility, too, is challenging because corporate networks are complex and can weave together controlnetworks (ownership, governance, etc), brand networks (franchises, consortia, etc.) and supplier networks (materialproviders, service providers, etc). Untangling these blends together data challenges, interface challenges, and, inplaces, philosophical challenges.
There is also a chicken-and-egg quality to the challenge of making corporate networks sustainable. On the onehand, there is often little incentive to gather data about the smaller companies at supplier networks’ edges, becausethe data are seen as worthless unless connected to brands familiar to western markets, and that requires networkmaps. But those who begin to work on network maps find that they are generally making connections betweenmore and more companies about which there is very little data.
Here is the deep value of the ChainReact proposal: by bringing together a savvy consortium to focus on threeplatforms at once, we can much more efficiently tackle a multi-faceted challenge that would defy a more piecemealapproach.