Value Creation

The benefits, in customer terms, made available by an organization’s products and services. Value is most often measured financially but can be emotional and meaningful as well.  Read More

Value Chain

Described and popularized by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, the value chain identifies the various value-adding activities of an organization or network. Often used as a tool for strategic planning because of its emphasis on maximizing value while minimizing costs.  Read More

Values

Human beliefs and ideals that affect someone’s perspective of themselves and others. Values are a socially-constructed phenomenon and relate both to identity and the establishment of behavior. They represent a level of significance between emotion and meaning.  Read More

Value

The concept of general economic or financial worth of a product or service. Also, a customer’s assessment of the ability of a product or service to meet their needs and desires. In neoclassical economics, value is simply the price an object would command in an open and competitive market.  Read More

Upcycle

A term coined by William McDonaugh and Michael Braungart. The process of converting an industrial nutrient (material) into something of similar or greater value, in its second life. Aluminum and glass, for example, can usually be upcycled into the same quality of aluminum and glass as the original products.  Read More

Trust

An assessment of whether or not someone will accept another’s promises, based on: sincerity (the difference between someone’s private and public conversations) competence reliability care  Read More

Triple Top Line

The effect that attention to sustainable management of natural, financial, and human capital has to an organization by increasing revenues (by offering more desirable products and services) and reducing costs and expenses throughout operations (through more streamlined operations. While many of these benefits are measured in terms of triple bottom line accounting, even more valuable are their effects to a company’s top-line financial performance... Read More

Triple Bottom Line

An addition of social and environmental values to the traditional economic measures of a corporation or organization’s success. Triple Bottom Line accounting attempts to describe the social and environmental impact of an organization’s activities, in a measurable way, to its economic performance in order to show improvement or to make evaluation more in-depth. There are currently few standards for measuring these other impacts, however.... Read More

Transparency

A self-regulatory tool to expose ethics and real time results of a business entity’s performance through accessible publication of the entity’s practices and behavior. Transparency often leads to greater accountability and fewer opportunities for corruption or abuse. There is a strong movement to increase the transparency of business processes in service of corporate responsibility reporting.  Read More

Transmaterialization

The process of satisfying the benefits of a product with a service. Often, services can offer the same activities to customers as some products. Transmaterialization requires the rethinking of business goals and objectives in order to envision new market opportunities. However, some customer sectors may not be ready or willing to accept new solutions (such as services where they once bought products). An approach to reducing the use of natural resources,... Read More