Business for Good,
Good for Business
We help businesses create value by solving problems for people and the planet.
We call this mutual value – where financial performance and positive impact reinforce each other over time.
Working with leaders, organizations, and systems, we develop the capabilities needed to create mutual value – unlocking new sources of innovation and resilience.
We are foundation-owned with an ambitious goal: to support the cultivation of businesses, and ultimately economies, that serve the long-term wellbeing of communities and the natural world.
Our Services
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Leadership Development
We help senior business and investment leaders develop the mindset and skills to lead for mutual value creation.
From executive residencies to immersive online learning programs and team workshops, we explore how to navigate complexity and drive transformational change.
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Strategic Advisory
We help organizations embed mutual value creation into strategy, decision-making, governance, and culture.
Together, we design business models capable of delivering both commercial performance and meaningful outcomes for people and planet.
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Systemic Action
We help cultivate local economic systems that generate mutual value at scale.
Through place-based
“Mutual Living Labs,” we bring together the private, non-profit, and public sectors to prototype and scale systemic solutions that work for all stakeholders.
Why “Mutual” Value?
Because the world needs a better form of value creation – one that positions the interests of society, the environment, and businesses in right relationship rather than in conflict.
“Mutual” value creation generates business models and economic systems that are:
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Meaningful
Centered around solving relevant societal and environmental challenges – where profit is an outcome, not the objective.
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Proximate
Built on close, trust-based relationships that foster understanding, co-creation, and shared accountability.
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Reciprocal
Designed to share benefits and burdens across stakeholders – ensuring value is not extracted at the expense of others.
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Regenerative
Structured to generate long-term, compounding value by strengthening the interdependencies between business, society, and nature.
Why Mutual Value “Labs”?
We are committed to intentional innovation – creating space to imagine, test, and scale business models and local economic systems built on mutual value creation.
Transformation happens when these mutual value prototypes are developed in real business contexts – where they are shaped by commercial and local realities and produce credible results that evidence the approach.
Mutual Value Labs comes alongside courageous business leaders and investors ready to pioneer such models and systems – developing the mutual value creation capabilities that are required across leadership, organizational, and systemic levels.
Together, we are building a new understanding of value – one that works in practice, not just in theory.
Our Origin Story
Our mutual value approach emerged from a multi-year research partnership between Mars, Inc. and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.
We led this research partnership while serving within Mars as the company’s internal think tank – testing the approach across a diverse range of business contexts from cocoa supply chains to pet care ecosystems and route-to-market programs.
As the broader potential of this work became clear, Mars spun us out in 2020 to share mutual value creation more widely, placing us under foundation ownership to safeguard our mission.
Since then, we have worked with stakeholders from a broad range of industries and geographies – from banking in Singapore to real estate management in the UK and healthcare in the US.
Explore a Better Way of Seeing and Doing Business
Mutual Value Labs develops the capabilities required to put human and environmental flourishing at the heart of value creation.
FROM
“How do we maximize profit while managing externalities?”
TO
“How can we create enduring value for business and the world at the same time?”
For decades, businesses have operated within systems that reward short-term financial performance while treating social and environmental challenges as external concerns.
But the pressures facing companies today, from climate disruption and economic volatility to declining trust and rising inequality, reveal the limits of that model.
The future belongs to the leaders and organizations capable of creating value differently:
more meaningfully
more relationally
more systemically
more sustainably
Not by sacrificing performance, but by redefining it.
Knowledge Hub
Meet Our Team
Our team combines diverse expertise across leadership, strategy, systems thinking, and organizational transformation. Mutual Value Labs is owned and governed by the Economics of Mutuality Foundation, providing long-term stewardship of our mission and approach.
Let’s Discuss
If you’d like to explore how the mutual value approach could drive transformation in your context, just reach out. We'd be delighted to start a conversation.