Five “Beyonds” For Tomorrow’s “B Economy”
Over-the-horizons thoughts from my autumnal round of speaking gigs
However it may have treated you, my November involved a blur of speaking gigs in places like London, Barcelona, Paris and Amsterdam—several with a strong B Corp theming. And the Amsterdam event, convened by B Lab Benelux, helped spur a line of thought developed further below. Its branding: the “Beyond Summit 2025.”
More specifically, the focus there was on “The Next Era of Impact”—exploring the implications of the global shifts now redefining the strategic role of business at a time where most policymakers are falling behind.
Welcome to the Circular Economy
For me, though, the most magical thing about the event was that it was held in Amsterdam’s Circa venue. The building has a rich history, being designed by one of my heroes, the American architect, Richard Buckminster Fuller. The structure was first introduced at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal, a decade before I would meet fuller in Reykjavik. It then became Europe’s first geodesic dome when installed in the Netherlands in 1971. And for many years, it was claimed to be the largest aluminum dome in the world.
Originally located at Schiphol as an aviation museum from 1971, the dome was dismantled in 2003 when the museum relocated to Lelystad. The roof structure was stored in shipping containers until 2018, when it was rebuilt at its current location as part of a new event venue. Circa’s website notes that:
Circa Amsterdam takes sustainability to the next level. The entire building uses LED lighting, ceilings are made from reclaimed wood, toilets were repurposed, and all walls are constructed from recycled plasterboard. The bar fronts are crafted from the containers in which the dome was stored, 75% of the flooring consists of reused materials, and the venue is heated and cooled using an energy-efficient thermal storage system. No gas is needed!
Still, the image that kept coming to mind as I moved from city to city, event to event, was the scorched heat shield of Apollo 10, which I had seen on an invitation-only visit to London’s Science Museum on 13thNovember. We were briefed on what it is like to live in space by Libby Jackson, the museum’s first Head of Space. In the background as she spoke, my eye kept catching the Apollo and Soyuz space capsules.
I think that the Apollo 10 heat shield image stuck in my memory as a reminder of the intense heat that space vehicles encounter on re-entering the planet’s atmosphere—serving as a visual metaphor for what changemakers are now experiencing as the old world order melts down and new ones start to self-assemble.
And as I travelled around the European end of the “B Economy,” I encountered several entrepreneurs who are being pushed to the limit in these disrupted times. In the background, the COP30 negotiations—held in Belém, where I found myself earlier in the year thanks to Natura—were obscenely losing all mention of coal, oil and gas in the final statement.
Not that I am surprised. When writing my 2001 book, The Chrysalis Economy, I noted that in the biological process of metamorphosis the organs of the caterpillar go to slurry. Then so-called imaginal cells scurry around in the debris stitching together elements of the butterfly that will eventually emerge. And, like it or not, the coming years will find us all up to our knees in evolutionary slurry.
So, what is the B Economy?
But you may ask, what is the B Economy? In headlines, it is the broader economic ecosystem being built around B Corporations, and other initiatives led by B Lab—the nonprofit that certifies B Corps. It stands for:
(1) business as a force for good, involving a shift from a profit-maximization model toward a world where businesses create positive social and environmental impact alongside financial returns;
(2) a regenerative, inclusive economic system, overriding older, extractive systems;
(3) standards that redefine success, with the B Impact Assessment and B Corp Certification helping to define what “good business” means in measurable terms across governance, workers, community, environment, and customers;
(4) collective action by businesses, with the B Economy seen to include: certified B Corporations, Benefit corporations (an emerging legal structure), companies using the B Impact Assessment tool, and other businesses and investors aligned with stakeholder governance—together forming a movement, rather than simply embracing one label; and
(5) a vision for systemic change where market incentives, governance innovations, and cultural shifts converge to redesign capitalism.
In space, technology is paramount—and the same was true of the first conference I spoke at on my return from Uzbekistan. This was the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit, where I was speaking on deep tech, hope and the climate emergency. Frustrating, though, because I was in and out before I could catch up with Mitiga Solutions, where I serve on the advisory board—though I did catch up briefly with their CEO, Dr Alejandro Martí, at the event.
Hope’s axe
To channel my feelings about hope at the summit, I quoted Rebecca Solnit, to the effect that:
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Look back far enough and it’s clear that even the humble axe caused all sorts of headaches once in widespread use. And, unsurprisingly, a recurrent theme at the Barcelona summit was not simply disruption but the headaches that new forms of “deep tech” will cause as they invert current ways of doing things.
To take just one example, a line that stuck in my head linked to the future of medicine, and ran as follows: “The patient will see you now.” In short, the old orders are being inverted—and AI was central to the conversation, whichever way you turned.
Five “Beyonds”
Still, forecasts have a way of inverting, too. Someone mentioned that the telecoms giant AT&T once predicted that everyone Earth would eventually need to be a telephone operator—but then along came a new technology, the switch. Not only did it mean that you needed radically fewer people working as manual operators, but it improved call quality, data services, and reliability.
Behind every mention of AI, though, I heard the unspoken question: Who will be disintermediated this time round? My message throughout was that AI will cause unimaginable, or at least currently unimagined pain and grief along the way, but my sense is that the sustainability agenda is beyond the standard issue human brain—so we can’t do it without AI.
As I travelled, along the way trying to fight off something very much like Covid, but which wasn’t testing that way, I tried to distil the messages that I was hearing. And after the Amsterdam “Beyond Summit” my conclusions began to take the form of “Five Beyonds.” Let me explain.
1. Beyond Trump
The first of my five “Beyonds” highlights the need for B-Corps—and like-minded business leaders everywhere—to work out how to operate beyond cycles of polarized, personality-driven politics.
As I travelled, the global media were lapping up every drop of Trump’s daily salivations, among other things his insistence that he would only attend the World Economic Forum summit in Davos this winter if the Forum dropped everything “woke.” All that means, I suspect, is that the interesting conversations move elsewhere.
And whatever he may like to think, Trump has a shelf-life, both political and physical. So, the key message here is that the B Economy must mature into a movement that persists and performs, regardless of political turbulence. This points toward a growing focus on:
· Policy resilience, which will involve building impact models that remain viable across elections and ideologies.
· Cross-partisan coalitions, engaging conservatives, liberals, and independents around shared goals (among them skilled jobs, entrepreneurship, and local prosperity).
· Economic narratives that bridge divides, which will involve framing sustainability in terms of competitiveness, resilience, and freedom from risk.
· Local-first impact, strengthening community-level institutions so that they can outlast national political swings.
2. Beyond Compliance
Compliance is critically important, no question, whether in terms of legislation or key market standards, among them B-Corp certification. But the dilution of EU legislation was very much in the news this month—and two things seem increasingly clear. First, we cannot rely on legislation to reboot markets on its own and, second, we need innovation at every level of our economies and societies—something that poorly-framed legislation can strangle in red tape.
Among the areas where innovation is increasingly needed are nature-positive accounting, circular business models and regenerative supply chains—a theme spotlighted at the Country & Town House awards ceremony I spoke at in London on Friday, 21st November. Hosted at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, this is the only event I attended this month where the tablecloths were ironed ahead of the sessions.
I was meant to do a concluding speech for the “Future Icons” event, but at the last moment suggested to Lucy Cleland, editorial director, that we might do a fireside chat together. Though I say it myself, it worked very well—and persuaded me that sustainability needs to be addressed at every end of the wealth spectrum.
At the same time, we cannot simply rely on businesses to volunteer. Yes, Country & Town House magazine is a B Corp, and most of the Future Icon winners are doing what they do out love and a personal sense of mission, but we need to reshape markets such that the things B Corps do naturally as part of who they are and what they do, become the default setting across entire markets. Which, like or not, takes us back to compliance.
3. Beyond Shareholders
A recurrent theme across the events I took part in this month was the need to expand shareholder-based mindsets and models to stakeholder-based forms of governance and wealth creation. This came through time and again at the 20thanniversary edition of Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, held in Paris. Like the Country & Town House event, it was held in glitzy surroundings, include The Ritz Hotel.
But a completely unexpected treat came on the first morning, where the organizers asked us to put away our cameras and phones—and onto the stage came Amal Clooney. I had never heard her before—but the quality of her thinking and the depth of her commitment quite literally blew me away. How can we lose when we have such people on our side?
The session I spoke at on Friday 7th November positioned me alongside professor Rebecca Henderson of Harvard Business School, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, and professor Anne-Laure Sellier of the HEC Paris business school.
Am fascinated to learn more about Anne-Laure’s work on how time perception influences decision-making, creativity, self-regulation, self-control, cognitive biases and debiasing, consumer happiness, and—more generally—how emotions and cognitions interact in judgment and decision-making.
The theme of the Women’s Forum event was “Courage”—and the evolving roles of women at every level in our businesses, economies and societies. My own thinking is that, just as with the right forms of AI, sustainability will be impossible without a profound shift toward new forms of gender diversity on boards and in leadership generally. All in service of wider stewardship goals.
4. Beyond Certification
As we move into what the Amsterdam event dubbed “the Next Era of Impact,” certification will come to be seen as a necessary condition for the coming transformations—but very far from a sufficient one. Judge that we will see an accelerating expansion from static certification badges to new forms of continuous, transparent, data-driven accountability.
My keynote explored some of the ways in which today’s mega-trends will shape tomorrow’s B Corps and, more importantly still, tomorrow’s markets. And we were reminded on just how important individual activism is in powering and shaping such change when the second keynote was delivered by Melati Wijsen, founder of Youthtopia.
I spent a wonderful couple of hours in the Green Room with Melati and her sister Isabel, a dynamic duo who first came to fame when their Bye Bye Plastic Bags campaign managed to achieve a ban on plastic bags in Bali. One area we talked about was the growing need for inter-generational dialogs around the critical challenges now facing us all.
Meanwhile, other areas where I would expect to see rapid evolution in the coming years are open-source ESF-plus and sustainability-focused impact methodologies, the introduction of a growing range of real-time impact dashboards, and the spread of third-party and community verification networks.
Then, on Wednesday 19th November, we had a joint session between Volans and Imperial’s Leonardo Centre for Business & Society—whose work I briefly spotlighted in an earlier Substack post. Their GOLDEN database is pitched as “the largest structured dataset of its kind, containing over 1 million initiatives from 15,000 companies across all sectors and headquartered in more than 80 countries.”
5. Beyond Our Businesses
Volans has been a supporter of the B Corp movement since the earliest days. We incubated B Lab UK for nine months ahead of its launch, for example, and became the first British B Corp shortly afterward. and it’s a remarkable fact that there are now 1,000+ B Corps in London alone, encouraging some people to describe London as the “B Corp capital of the world.”
Among the B Corp entrepreneurs I met for the first time this month was Charlie Bigham, founder of Charlie Bigham’s. This was at B Lab UK’s 10th anniversary conference on Thursday 13th November.
As his company’s website says, he’s a real person—and you really couldn’t make him up! The sort of business innovator who has helped me keep my own batteries charged over the decades.
But even though I have gladly agreed to head west to visit Charlie Bigham’s in situ, my whole “Rewilding Markets” venture is dedicated to the idea that the time has come to radically expand our focus from iconic individuals and businesses to the question of how we shape tomorrow’s markets, economics and, ultimately, capitalisms.
Impact needs to happen at system scale, not just firm-by-firm. Among the things that need to happen for that to become market reality are policy coalitions shaping fair and green regulation, the formation of more sector-level coalitions (e.g., B-Food, B-Fashion), and pre-competitive collaboration on sustainability technology.
As I have found myself saying on several occasions this month, Donald Trump is a gift to the sustainability industry—whatever he may intend. And the reason is that he is forcing us to revisit basic assumptions, radically evolve our mental and business models, and consider forming “coalitions of the willing” with people working in sectors we might once have considered beyond the pale, for example in multinational corporations, private equity and, yes, even the security services.
It’s time to move beyond ourselves, beyond our current sense of what’s possible (and what’s impossible), and beyond our businesses and organizations to address the fundamentals of system change.
It may be beyond our pay grade now, but someone is going to drive the necessary transformations—and it would be great to ensure that what comes next is informed by the values, priorities and spirit of the B Economy.
John Elkington is Founder & Global Ambassador at Volans and Chairman & Chief Pollinator at Countercurrent. His personal website can be accessed here.
His latest book, Tickling Sharks, is available on Amazon and through good bookshops.
Thank you John - I needed the positivity of this article right now. Based – as I know it is – in your decades of experience in this space and its cycles, it is salve for those having to dig deeper and deeper for energy to keep putting one foot in front of the other at the moment.
Dear John, thank you again for the insightful piece. I have one thing that I can not really make sense. Eccluding the government, shareholders have the power and legitimacy to hire or fire decision- makers. And those decision makers are judged by shareholders. Objectively, how can we priotirise stakeholders’ cliams (other than using it as a tool for shareholder claims)?