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Aside from pure monetary donations, however, is a new model that is transforming corporate philanthropy.

Increasingly, corporations are turning to a shared value model, in which companies work in alignment with society rather than against it, producing mutual benefits to both the community and the corporation

It evolves the traditional model of financial and material goods donations, to one in which corporations leverage a range of corporate assets including employee skills, business acumen and partner networks, to drive social change.

Here’s the shift: Instead of viewing it as our responsibility to drive business and social value, view it also a valuable opportunity to rethink existing practices.

The business case for social innovation

there are a variety of benefits for an organization, from brand building, to staff retention, and even improved client stickiness. Shareholders and the investment community are also increasingly considering corporate responsibility when making investment decisions.

collaborations can drive innovation through necessity. Non-profits work in extreme environments, faced with limited infrastructure, connectivity and staff. Operating in these situations exposes corporate staff to new sets of customer challenges, which can often deliver innovations in product design or services into the business.

by working with a non-profit organization, a corporation can demonstrate its expertise to a new audience, expanding its business network.

Increasingly, investors weigh environmental, social and governance  data when making investment decisions. While such data has been a benchmark for European-based companies for some time, we are now seeing a more global adoption and interest in this, which should be another forcing function for more corporations to act as good corporate citizens.

Applying social innovation in practic

A good starting point is to assess the company’s available skills, expertise, partnerships against the touch-points the company currently has within a given community. From there, establish specific goals to achieve and a strategic plan to meet those goals.

Companies that have an expertise in technology, for example, can collaborate with non-profits or social entrepreneurs to provide the infrastructure backbone that turn their ideas into reality. With the social enterprise mPedigree Network, HP leveraged its technology expertise in cloud-based services to design and build an anti-drug counterfeiting service in Africa. Counterfeit medicine is a significant problem in developing countries, causing more than 700,000 deaths each year. The new service helps save lives by enabling patients to validate the integrity of their medicine by sending a free text message.

Gabi Zedlmayer is Vice President of Hewlett-Packard’s Office of Global Social Innovation.

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was.