If you need any more evidence that there is nothing new under the sun, consider this example from the latest effort to tie capitalist logic and social consciousness together.
Known as "shared value," it's an effort to get companies to think more about the long-run viability of their businesses rather than just short-term profit. It calls on business leaders to reorient their thinking so that everything touched by a company's activities - not just shareholders, but also customers, employees, neighbors, and the larger environment - benefits from them over time.
One of the key recommendations made in the Harvard Business Review article introducing the concept is that companies focus less on just cutting production costs and more on developing the human and business capital of a region by forming "clusters" of related businesses that feed off one another and become stronger together.
This is actually an old idea in new dress - namely, that communities can prosper by developing a comparative advantage in an industry or field, usually through a concentrated presence of companies. The general public expresses the idea whenever it speaks of "Wall Street" for finance and banking, "Detroit" for automobiles, "Hollywood" for movies or "Silicon Valley" for computers. Each of these areas grew rich by having many firms in the same line of business in close proximity, allowing for easier exchange of ideas and sharing of support services.
Over the past few decades, a cluster of just this type has grown in the Philadelphia region -- medicine, healthcare and biomedical research. It's a cluster with deep roots: the region is home to the nation's first medical school, its first hospital, and one of its oldest drug makers. The cluster has grown by feeding off the knowledge and research produced in the region's medical schools and teaching hospitals.
Those teaching hospitals are all affiliated with local universities, another cluster with deep roots - the medical school, for instance, was established in 1765 by what would become the nation's first university 14 years later. The Philadelphia region also has an unusually high concentration of colleges and universities, including several of the nation's most prestigious small colleges and universities with national reputations.
Today, this combination of higher education and the life sciences - popularly known as "eds and meds" - is the Philadelphia region's main economic engine. In 2009, the Milken Institute ranked Greater Philadelphia's life sciences cluster as the nation's second largest, and the eds-and-meds sector is the region's largest employer. As many of the institutions in this sector are nonprofits, the sort of thinking promoted by the "shared value" idea is already ingrained in their DNA, so it's much less likely that Philadelphia will suffer Detroit's fate - these enterprises aren't going to outsource or offshore their research and development, for instance.
The "eds and meds" in Philadelphia offer a real-world example of "shared value" in action, and as such, could serve as a model for for-profit businesses seeking to reorient their thinking. But that thinking is not really new, as the "eds and meds" already demonstrate. Maybe one of these days, people will speak of "Philadelphia" as a shorthand term for biomedicine.
Sandy Smith has been blogging for PhillyJobs.com since 2010. In addition to launching award-winning newspapers and newsletters at the University of Pennsylvania and Widener University, Sandy is a veteran writer whose articles and essays have appeared in several local and regional media outlets, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia CityPaper, and PGN, and on several Web sites. He is also an active participant on several discussion boards, including PhiladelphiaSpeaks.com, where he posts as “MarketStEl.” He has been supporting himself through a combination of freelance and part-time work and unemployment compensation since early 2009 and is himself an active job-seeker. Read more of his posts on PhillyJobsBlog.com and follow him to Beyond.com for more job opportunities.
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