A leading manufacturer of furniture for offices, hospitals, and classrooms, Steelcase uses innovative research to design workspaces. Three years into Ashoka’s partnership with Steelcase, we’ve learned that the company’s take on innovation goes far beyond furniture.

We met with Serena Borghero, Director Media Relations EMEA at Steelcase, to share insights for any business can and should play a role in social impact. Serena makes the case for tearing down the walls that still exists between companies and non-profits, between social entrepreneurs and business leaders so we can all work towards a better world . Watch the full conversation here.

Serena, what led you to be an ambassador for social change?

I’ve been traveling and living abroad most of my life. That brought me to look at what else is in the world and how different people live and manage their lives. I chose to study business administration because I wanted to work to prevent inequalities from happening at the source, rather than trying to fix them once they were already there.

Is there a business case for social innovation? What is it?

Yes! I’m a strong believer that there is a business case for social impact. I think every CEO at the moment is challenged with the question around purpose. How do we embrace a higher purpose? All of our stakeholders, customers, partners, suppliers, the banks sponsoring you, the people buying stocks, ask companies to have a position when it comes to purpose and social and environmental impact.

It is really important to have a vision and stick to it in a consistent and authentic way. There’s nothing worse for a business than saying that you stand for something and then not fulfilling that promise. This destroys all the trust that has been built among shareholders. Companies need to find their purpose and deliver on that promise.

I think that the pandemic has only accelerated the need for companies to [identify] a purpose and to commit to it, because the world needs to shift to allow for long term sustainable business models. There’s no time to wait.

Steelcase is a furniture company, right? Why did you decide to partner with Ashoka?

I would challenge the fact that we are a furniture company! We are actually a very human-centric company: what we study is people, how people interact and how their behavior is shaped by physical space and furniture. We use those insights to design furniture and spaces. We want to unlock the potential of every individual and allow them to do their best.

Bringing equality in opportunities has been at the core of what the company stands for, with a strong commitment towards the ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) aspects of the business. We are equally committed to our environmental performance in fighting climate change, reducing inequalities, and fighting for equity in education, for example.

As a business, we are an actor in this landscape of change. But we are just one of the many and there’s no social change that one company or one organization can achieve alone. Ashoka provides a partnership and a platform for scaling our impact across the globe, which is very unique.

We share a vision of a future where there’s no traditional business company that only cares about profit and there’s no traditional non-profit that only received money from the corporate world to do something good. The future is a hybrid model where all of the stakeholders involved in changemaking are equally responsible, each of them for one part of together moving the needle of social impact and tackling big issues.

Social change also happens through the power of individuals. What impact initiatives are you launching at Steelcase?

There’s a delicate balance between providing people guidance, putting in place processes, and then empowering individuals within a shared vision to really go for it. I’ve learned a lot from our global social impact lead, Kim Dabbs, who pioneered social impact at Steelcase. What Kim has done, together with the larger team and the endorsement of our CEO and Board, is to create teams of Steelcase employees around the world that are called Change Corp.

Any employee can start a Change Corp. I started one here in Amsterdam, there’s one in Munich, in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico, North America, and more. All employees are aware of our social impact strategy and they can choose within that framework which actions to put in place locally and how to run them. So we have initiatives around education in India, initiatives around women in the workplace in Munich. It adjusts to the local context and culture. The whole Change Corp team meets regularly to share updates. All our efforts are then blended into the annual social impact report.

What are some insights from your social innovation work?

I think a pivotal moment for our organization has been the collaboration with Ashoka. We had three main objectives in our collaboration: help Ashoka support its [social entrepreneurs], showcase impact, and, importantly, have Ashoka’s support in empowering our employees and helping us scale our impact across the globe.

[We had the chance] to attend some of the trainings that Ashoka organized and key gatherings where we heard stories of the Fellows and got inspired to act. Most recently I attended Ashoka’s “Future of Business” training, a six-week course to nail down what social entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship are and how companies can scale impact. It provided a very clear framework for thinking about social intrapreneurship within a corporation. To Steelcase it offered the perfect tools to bring what we have learned to our Change Corp teams around the world and to measure our impact in a more structured way.

We now have in place several action steps that will allow us to scale what we have learned and multiply the impact throughout all of our Change Corp groups across the world.

What does a world where Everyone is a Changemaker mean to you?

I believe there is no future where the business sector and the social sector are siloed. I believe in a future where companies and individuals within companies are social intrapreneurs — so they run a business that makes profit in a healthy, sustainable way.

Organizations that are mostly focusing on making an impact on social and environmental issues go beyond the old model of getting money from the business and using that money to make an impact — but co-create solutions together with the companies.

It is within this co-creation future that I hope I can play a role — and it doesn’t really matter to me whether that’s a social intrapreneurial role within a business or a social entrepreneurial role within a non-profit. To me, the two roles are very similar and need to be even more similar in the future. Whichever one I’ll be playing, I don’t mind — as long as I’m able to make an impact.

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Learn more Steelcase social impact initiatives and The Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program, along with the Future of Business course.