Use this B Corp Innovation Toolkit to help you design social innovation practices into your business model. Transform your next B Corp certification into a measurable ROI driver for your company.

Thanks for attending From Compliance to Competitive Advantage: Innovating Through New B Corp Standards at the 2026 B Corp Champions Retreat in Milwaukee. We hope you found the session useful with actionable takeaways. 

In researching our presentation, we compiled the resources below to help B Corp business leaders use innovation practices as a potential competitive advantage under v2 standards. We have broken down the resources by categories used in our presentation. 

We look forward to learning how you have used them in your own innovation practice. Please reach out and share your story. 

With gratitude,

Carolina Miranda & Tim Frick 

Below are specific questions posed during our session based on individual impact areas within v2 B Corp standards.

Purpose & Stakeholder Governance

Innovation Opportunity Questions: 

• Reimagine your business model. In what different ways could you fulfill its purpose?
• Co-create your company’s strategy with the people it affects. What would change if your stakeholders helped shape your direction?
• Consider future stakeholders. How would your decisions change if future generations were considered today’s stakeholders?

B Corp Example

Dopper’s mission is to end packaged water. Their theory of change captures that their work is about more than just selling reusable bottles. They focus on system-level transformation: getting individuals to refill instead of buy, urging companies to provide tap water, and lobbying governments to make it safe and accessible for everyone. 

Fair Work

Innovation Opportunity Questions: 

• Build a business model that supports living wages. What would need to change to make that possible?
• Measure and rebuild your culture. How would your workplace change if workers could design it themselves?
• Elevate your biggest stakeholders from employees to owners. How would your team make decisions differently if everyone was an owner?

B Corp Example

Ocaquatics is a Miami-based swim school with a twofold mission: to teach families to love swimming and become safer in and around the water, and to grow their team members within a framework of social and environmental responsibility. Their commitment to their employees is so strong that they became an employee-owned company in 2024, two years after becoming a B Corp.

JEDI

Innovation Opportunity Questions: 

• Bring more voices into your leadership decisions. What better decisions could you make if more perspectives were in the room?
• Hire from talent pools your competitors are ignoring. What skills and ideas are you missing because you look in the same places?
• Redesign a product or service to work for people who’ve been left out. What new market could open up if you designed for inclusion?

B Corp Example

Rhino Foods, a Vermont-based food manufacturer, has made inclusive hiring a part of their business strategy. They found that some of their strongest employees were people who had faced significant barriers to employment but thrived when given a real chance. They remove barriers by not requiring background checks, interviews, or previous experience — focusing instead on training and supporting the whole person.

Human Rights

Innovation Opportunity Questions: 

• Integrate human rights into product design. What would you build differently if dignity was a requirement from day one?
• Redesign your business model around your human rights strategy. What if avoiding harm was built into how you make money?
• Tell the truth about your industry. What are your competitors not willing to say?

B Corp Example

Tony’s Chocolonely was founded in 2005 by a journalist who discovered that most chocolate had links to child labor and forced labor, and decided the best way to change that was to start making chocolate himself. They have been outspoken about the problems in the chocolate industry and promoted transparency and traceability in their supply chain, including by publicly providing their 5 Sourcing Principles and encouraging others in their industry to follow them as well. 

Climate Action

Innovation Opportunity Questions: 

• Redesign your business model around the planet. What would be possible if your company existed to solve a climate problem?
• See your supply chain as a network of climate partners. What if the companies you buy from became climate allies?
• Listen to your workers and community to find climate solutions. What do they know that you don’t?

B Corp Example

World Centric provides compostable foodservice packaging made from renewable, plant-based materials, reducing the reliance on fossil fuels which is common in the food service industry. They also donate 25% of their profits to grassroots environmental and social organizations whose programs not only sequester and/or reduce CO2 emissions but engage local communities.

Environmental Stewardship & Circularity

Innovation Opportunity Questions: 

• Design a product or service that truly loops back into use forever. What would it take to be one of the first in your industry to do this?
• Rethink the business model around how resources are used. How can your company change the financial incentives for your supply chain?
• Put nature on the board. What would the planet say as a board member?

B Corp Example

Natura is a Brazilian cosmetics company and the world’s largest B Corp. Over more than 20 years they’ve actively protected 2.2 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest while positively impacting more than 11,000 families. Their model makes it more profitable for Amazon communities to sustainably harvest ingredients than to cut down trees — farmers could earn $7 for cutting down an endangered ucuuba tree, or about $12 by selling its seeds to Natura for use in soaps and moisturizers. 

Government Affairs & Collective Action

Innovation Opportunity Questions: 

• Take a public stand on an issue even if it’s unpopular. What does your company stand for?
• Build a thought leadership platform. What do you know that could shift your whole industry?
• Stop competing and start collaborating. What could you achieve with your biggest competitor as a partner?

B Corp Example

Patagonia recognizes that the need for collective action has increased as threats to the planet have grown. As a company, they’re known for taking a bold stance on environmental issues, going so far as to join a coalition of Indigenous and grassroots groups to sue the first Trump administration when they rolled back protections for the Bears Ears National Monument.

In 2022, they transferred ownership to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit that can legally lobby for climate policy and support political candidates. 

Session Resources

We have compiled the resources below based on research conducted specifically for our session at Champions Retreat and services Cultivating Capital and Mightybytes already provide. We hope you find them useful in your own social innovation initiatives. 

Organizational Purpose Resources

The resources below shed light on how purpose drives progress in organizations that prioritize it.

• The Type of Purpose That Makes Companies More Profitable, Harvard Business Review
• Social Purpose Strategy Guide, Canadian Purpose Economy Project
• How to Create a Strengths-Based Culture, Gallup
• Why Most Companies Fail at Purpose—and How to Fix It, Doug Utberg

Stakeholder & Collaboration Resources

Explore these resources to learn how good stakeholder collaboration practices result in stronger communities, more resilient companies, and better solutions. 

• How High-Performing Teams Build Trust, Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review
• Stakeholder Mapping: A Guide for Purpose-Driven Organizations, Mightybytes
• Five-Step Approach to Stakeholder Engagement, Business for Social Responsibility

Design & Innovation Resources

The resources below explore various innovation practices to help you bridge the gap between innovation initiatives, v2 B Corp Standards, and your company’s competitive advantage. 

• The Systemic Design Framework, Design Council
• Our Problem Framing Guide, Mightybytes
• Business Origami: A Method For Service Design, Chenghan (Hank) Ke
• What is Designable in Organizations?, Stephanie Gioia
• Design thinking isn’t the problem — here’s what it takes to do good design, Kal Joffres
• This is Service Design Doing: A Practitioners Handbook, O’Reilly Media
• The Eight Core Principles of Strategic Innovation, MIT Sloan Management Review
• What is Designable in Organizations?, Stephanie Gioia
• Understanding Customer Journey Mapping, Mightybytes
• How Wireframes and Rapid Prototypes Improve Digital Projects, Mightybytes
• Design Sprints for Social Impact Projects, Mightybytes

Resilience Resources

Continuous improvement is baked into v2 B Corp standards in order to make progress toward the inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy we collectively envision. The resources below can help you build resilience into your business model in order to support these efforts. 

• Impact Business Model Canvas, Stanford University
• How to Design an Impact Business Model, Mightybytes
• Reinventing Organizations Wiki, Frédéric Laloux
• How to Tap Into the B Corp Strategic Advantage: The New Standards Framework, Cultivating Capital
• Org Design for Design Orgs, O’Reilly Media
• How to Improve Your Digital Resilience, Mightybytes

Hopefully, the three exercises conducted during our retreat session can jumpstart your company’s social innovation efforts. Combined with the additional resources in this B Corp Innovation Toolkit, here are some suggested next steps that might help. 

1. Conduct an Internal Workshop

Collaborate with your team to identify both short- and long-term innovation opportunities through B Corp impact areas in the v2 standards. Start with the exercises we ran during our session and progress from there. Use our deck linked above as a resource.

2. B Corp Innovation Mastermind

Join an upcoming Innovation Mastermind engagement with Mightybytes and Cultivating Capital. This engagement includes information covered in our session plus detailed deep dives into how each of the v2 standards impact areas could be applied to your business model and organizational governance. 

Each Innovation Mastermind group is limited to 6-8 people and requires a 90-day commitment. It also includes:

• Monthly check-ins
• Online support during that time
• Additional materials and resources not shared in our session, including a follow-up workshop to discuss next steps from the retreat.

Price = $500 per person.

Sign up below to get more information about this 90-day engagement on using innovation techniques to get an ROI on your B Corp certification. 

3. Work with Partners

If you need a dedicated partner to help you design the B Corp innovation framework into your own business, please reach out via the information below.