In January 2011, Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer published a landmark Harvard Business Review article diagnosing capitalism’s legitimacy crisis. Businesses were viewed as prospering at society’s expense, trapped in narrow, short-term profit models that ignored customer well-being, resource depletion, supplier fragility, and community distress. Their solution was not more CSR or philanthropy—peripheral activities treating societal issues as costs—but creating shared value (CSV): policies and practices that enhance competitiveness while advancing economic and social conditions in the communities where companies operate. CSV reconceives value creation as expanding the total economic and social pie, reconnecting business success with social progress.

Fifteen years later, in mid-2026, the diagnosis holds, yet the tools have transformed. Autonomous agentic AI systems plan and execute tasks with minimal oversight. Carbon-conversion technologies turn CO₂ into fuels, chemicals, and materials at scale. Waste-to-energy has advanced from incineration to precision gasification and microbial platforms. The renewables-to-fusion journey has reached grid-pilot demonstrations, with private funding surpassing $4.5 billion. Green mobility now includes fully autonomous, vehicle-to-grid fleets. Full-scale circularity—closed-loop design, AI-tracked material passports, and regenerative manufacturing—is becoming industry standard.

These breakthroughs do not replace CSV; they supercharge it. The 2011 framework’s three avenues remain the operating system. Agentic AI, carbon conversion, waste-to-energy, fusion, green mobility, and circularity supply the new hardware.

Reconceiving Products and Markets: From Scarcity to Regenerative Abundance

The first avenue—meeting unmet societal needs—has exploded.........

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