In the early 1900s Shishir Bajaj’s grandfather Jamnalal was involved in the Freedom Movement in India alongside Mahatma Ghandi, even spending time in jail as a freedom fighter in his fight against the British. Driven by strong ethics and a will for Indians to govern themselves he added philanthropy to his arsenal of weapons, alongside his strong political ideologies. So strong, in fact, that he refused the title of honorary magistrate bestowed on him by the British Raj. Instead, he opened the first temple to the downtrodden, now 100 years old.

While Jamnalal never saw his cherished dream of an independent India, dying five years before independence day celebrations in 1947, his principles and convictions have been passed down through generations of Bajaj children. His legacy is presently in the care of Shishir Bajaj, Chairman and Managing Director of Bajaj Hindusthan sugar company, the largest in Asia and fifth largest in the world.

The principles that his grandfather learnt under Gandhi have been applied to this large industrial business, one that almost qualifies as a regional government in scale and impact. Jamnalal, with Gandhi’s blessing, saw at an early stage that there was a need for new companies to feed the economic challenges of building a new nation and formed the sugar company in 1931.

“Because my grandfather was too busy with the Freedom Movement, he set up the business and let my father run it,” says Shishir. And in a move that predates Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge campaign by 80 years, Jamnalal formed a trust for the wealth because he didn’t want to own more than he needed; a very unusual move at the time.

Two foundations, the Bajaj Foundation and Jamnalal Bajaj Trust now support more than 100,000 families in 501 villages, positively affecting the lives of more than 615,000 individuals within the company’s 12 sugar production areas. In keeping with the family tradition of social change, Shishir’s son Kushagra suggested the formation of an action plan five years ago that scaled the company’s social good onto a much larger platform.

“The number of villages we’d like to cover in the next five years is 1,000,” says Shishir. “There are about 700 districts in India and if we can capture just two I think it will be a seriously good achievement.” As the most populous country on earth with just over 1.2 billion people, two districts is not the small number some would imagine. Some of the projects Shishir is involved in include sustainable agricultural practices, and women’s self help groups.

A water resource project has seen 82 rivers deepened, 120km of riverbeds rejuvenated and schools built at seven of the ten sugar factories. Other projects include an energy company that produces 450 megawatts of power, with plans for a 2,000-megawatt power plant underway that will cost $2 billion.

One wonders what Jamnalal would say today if he saw how his sugar factory, one of the first in India, had transcended profit to become a builder of infrastructure to a nation in need. As Gandhi would have said at the time, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is a surgeon, drug developer, entrepreneur and the richest man in American medicine. Since selling the company that makes his breakthrough cancer drug Abraxane in 2010, he has been developing and expanding NantWorks, an LA-based medical technology company with implications far beyond medicine. Kathleen Miles spoke to him about his groundbreaking work.  We’re on the NantWorks campus in Culver City. Can you explain what you are developing here?

I started this concept in 2005. It dawned on me that the world has not prepared itself for the convergence of supercomputing, cloud computing, machine vision and artificial intelligence. What we’re doing here is converging what I think is the next revolution of mankind. We’ve had the industrial revolution, and we’ve had mechanical and energy improvements. I think we’ve now reached a stage of enlightenment where technology will allow mankind to evolve to this era of cognitive power. A cognitive revolution will bring the wisdom of the Internet and what we know as mankind to somebody as they’re interacting with the real world. NantWorks is a company to figure out how we’re going to transform using the convergence of huge technology in how we work, live and play. Imagine if da Vinci – an engineer, an artist – had the supercomputer in his hands, instead of a quill. That’s what NantWorks is about.

Break down the elements of what you call the “ecosystem” of companies under the umbrella of NantWorks.

I needed to enable machines to talk to machines. So we built this operating system that ties to 25,000 medical devices, puts the data in the cloud and self-populates the electronic medical record. I call that the ability to capture the human signal engine – very much like when we send our astronauts up to space and capture their vital signs. If we can capture vital signs and medical records and give that to the doctor for decision support, that’s NantHealth. As we were building that, I realized that the fiber infrastructure doesn’t exist. The data centers don’t exist to address yottabytes of data. Ten thousand patients alone is equivalent to eight times the download of the entire Netflix library. So we needed to build a fiber infrastructure that runs across the country.

We now have 12,000 miles of fiber running across the country, in which we have seven data centers that are completely HIPAA-compliant, and that is NantCloud. I then realized that we need to have this information that is completely mobile. I needed to take the mobile device and give it machine vision, let it recognize physical objects and transport information. Then we could have a supercomputer in the hands of a physician. That’s NantMobile, which will also address the consumer and bring sports, entertainment, health and FitBit, all on your mobile device.

But the ability to transmit data fast on this mobile device required a chip that hadn’t been built yet. We needed a chip that can move data not at kilobits but at gigabits — without wiping out the battery life. Nobody could build that chip. So we created a company called NanTronics and created a chip that can move data 2.5 gigabits per second and go in a smartphone.

We just launched it in Barcelona. We’ve also built chips that can make a hearing aid that’s tunable by a smartphone and costs $300 (as opposed to $4,000 now). One phone can treat an entire village. Finally, we realized that it’s not only the genes that are important. There’s a whole world of proteomics and genomics, and the two had never been put together. So we created this company called NantOmics and built a supercomputer that measures the genes and the proteins in 47 seconds so that we can go from gene to protein to drug.

If artificial intelligence is part of this technological revolution that you would like to integrate into our health care system, do you anticipate it will ever fill in for human doctors?

I look upon the human-patient relationship like a priest-parish relationship. I don’t think there will ever or should there ever be the absence of human-human interaction. I don’t call it artificial intelligence – I call it amplified intelligence. We’re coining this term AI3, meaning amplified, actionable and adaptive intelligence. We’re going to enhance the cognitive capabilities of a human being who can’t recall information at the speed and depth that we need to make the right decision.

But this information is in the cloud and can give the doctor actionable information in real time. With actionable, adaptive intelligence, everybody learns from everybody else. Amplified intelligence makes sure we give the right care at the right time, especially when it comes to making life-threatening decisions.

How will the technology you are developing be used to treat cancer and other diseases?

According to a recent World Health Organization report, in 20 years, there will be about 24 million diagnoses of cancer per year. It’s an epidemic. There’s no question that we’re losing the war against cancer. The disease is so complex. It’s like whack-a-mole — you hit something and another thing pops up. And many cancer patients are getting inappropriate care.

How do we change that? The doctor is inundated with a deluge of information, or big data, and cannot address it in real time. So we’ve built a tool that is now adopted by most of the oncologists in the United States that takes thousands of protocols, the patient’s diagnosis, their biomarkers and their history and maps it in real time. As you treat the cancer patient with chemotherapy poisons, you’re affecting the genomic and proteomic profile of the cancer cell itself. We need to find the cell that’s now floating in the blood and do the genomic and proteomic analysis so we can predict early on what drug to give before it gets even worse.

It’s the only chance we have to put ourselves on the path to the cure. So we built a supercomputer that can do the genomic analysis rapidly. Think about the math. There are 10,000 new analyses that we need to do a day. It takes 11 weeks to do one patient’s analysis of the entire human genome. So we built a supercomputer that can do the entire analysis in 47 seconds.

In June, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for the first time, we will be presenting the results of the first 5,000 patients’ genome sequencing. We were able to do all theses analyses in less than 69 hours and provide the information of what drug to give to the patient based on their genetic fingerprint. We’ve built this clinical operating system to be completely inter-operable across the entire country as well as England, Canada and China.

Then we can present this complete information exchange to the pharmaceutical company and say, ‘Don’t treat lung cancer as one conglomerate disease, but as a multitude of rare diseases.’ The pharmaceutical industry used to always think that it needed to develop a blockbuster, billion-dollar drug. The problem is the blockbuster model before would help 20 percent of the people – say, with lung cancer. On the other hand, if you took lung cancer and you broke it down into 700 fingerprints of personalized medicine, you could have 90 percent response rate.

You have developed technology that helps the blind see. How does it work?

The technology is to have a camera recognize any physical object in the real world and then impart the knowledge of what the object is so the blind can hear from the camera what it’s looking at. In essence, we’re creating a seeing-eye dog with your mobile device. It’s very difficult to read money. Now you can take a $5 or $10 bill, no matter how it’s wrapped, and the camera will tell you what it is. That was released as LookTel Money Reader. We then released another app called LookTel Recognizer. It will let you recognize physical objects in the real world.

Are there other applications for machine vision?

In a sense, what we’ve done is created the actual browser of the physical world. Now the physical world can be brought to life by recognizing objects and curating information from the Internet. This also enables mobile commerce, including collecting coupons and closing a transaction. That’s in the context of NantMobile, which we’re about to launch in the retail space.

How will your information technology help the poor, particularly in LA’s inner city?

I grew up in South Africa. When I came here, I began to see that there is a medical apartheid in this country. The rich are well cared for, the middle class are sort of well cared for and the poor are just out of luck. A woman in Martin Luther King hospital in South LA called 911 from the hospital floor because no one was taking care of her. She died on that floor, and four hours later, nobody even knew she was dead. So I walked the floors where she was and went to see the doctor. I said, ‘How could this happen?’ They felt there was this inequality of information and care. She was Hispanic-speaking, so maybe it was a language barrier, but there was absence of care and skill sets down there. So they closed the hospital. But that wasn’t the answer.

The answer was to bring care down there. I’m glad to say [LA County Supervisor] Mark Ridley Thomas and myself fought very hard, and the hospital is about to reopen next year. The University of California system is bringing care there. And information technology will make it possible to have information transferred –whether you’re in South Central LA or Beverly Hills – in a patient’s time of need.

Kathleen Miles is Senior Editor of The WorldPost, a partnership of The Huffington Post and Berggruen Institute on Governance. This piece first appeared in Worldpost.

Recent research shows spending money on corporate social responsibility is no longer seen as a detriment to a company’s profitability. Stock analysts now view such expenditures as essential to a company’s long-term brand and value. Coca-Cola is one of the many companies that are making efforts to tackle the world’s greatest societal challenges — water scarcity, climate change, and even the rights of women and girls in the developing world. Muhtar Kent, (pictured above) the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Coca-Cola since 2009, talks about how the beverage company is imbedding sustainability into its business.

Over the past several years, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved from simply being an isolated “do good” arm of a company to something more profound that’s changing the way organizations do business every day. How has Coca-Cola integrated these CSR principles into your operations?

Kent: Sustainability isn’t new to us but we’ve been intensifying our focus on it. We’re prioritizing programs centered on water, women and well-being—all three of which are essential to our business. For example, we’re working to achieve water neutrality by 2020. So far, we’ve replaced 52% of the water we use in making our beverages and reducing water usage across our 800-plus bottling plants helps reduce the overall cost of production. We have also committed to economically empowering 5 million women by 2020. This is the largest such program ever undertaken by a commercial organization. Our micro distribution centers (MDCs) in Africa, many of which are run by women, help our beverages reach small shops and kiosks that can’t be served by more trucks and vans and create value for our business, our retail and restaurant customers, and the broader communities.

Restructuring a company to focus on sustainability doesn’t happen overnight, so how long did it take to get everyone on board and how did you deal with any resistance to change?

Sustainability can no longer be a compliance measure or a “nice-to-do”; it’s now a business planning imperative with measures, goals, and explicit value connected to our programs. Because of this importance, we didn’t really experience any resistance. There were certainly people who challenged our approach and provided candid feedback on how we could improve but overall there was collective agreement that this was necessary.

If the ultimate goal is to create both economic value and social value, how do you strike that balance?

There may be an initial financial investment that doesn’t create an immediate and direct financial return—that’s OK. We know that by investing today, we will ultimately be a stronger, more sustainable business down the line. For example, developing our PlantBottle innovation — a fully recyclable packaging made of up to 30% renewable plant material — took significant upfront investment but we felt it made good sense, especially with oil prices fluctuating. And it’s helping contribute to our goal of reducing the carbon footprint of the drink in a consumer’s hand by 25% by 2020. It has also been a tremendous boost to our Dasani water brand, helping us win new customers and consumers.

Have you faced any specific challenges in measuring the social value you’re creating?

Coca-Cola operates in more than 200 countries and the needs of each market depend on a variety of factors. While some markets face economic issues, others may face resource scarcity and gender inequality, and some face all of these issues and more. It can be difficult to measure and compare. Thus, we operate a value creation model that is globally driven but locally focused.

Can you explain what you mean by a “value creation model”?

I mean one that creates value for all the stakeholders touched by our business. Consider PlantBottle. We’re able to put a package in consumers’ hands that reduces demand for oil. If consumers love our beverage more, that benefits our customers. And when the packaging is less expensive and we’re less dependent on petroleum-based plastic, this creates value for our shareowners and our bottling partners.

What is Coca-Cola doing that’s different from what other companies are doing?

There are a lot of companies and organizations out there doing great work but our scale allows us to think big and execute. It’s not just our size as a company or a brand, but the fact that we have operations in more than 200 countries. This footprint enables us to set up partnerships with organizations large and small to make the greatest local or global impact. We can fund projects at levels that make a real difference. And often times, we can use the size and nature of our operating model to address a need in a significant way.

We also have our distribution network, which connects us directly to the 24 million retail customers we visit every week. As the world strives to bridge the gap of the last mile between the virtual world and the real world, we have an opportunity to help make this connection. We’re continuously working to make the most of our distribution network as well as our virtual and physical assets.

How much of your company’s move in this direction is customer-driven vs. conscience-driven?

Today’s consumers expect companies to be socially responsible — not just on the surface either. Our brand is in our consumers’ hands but that’s not the primary reason for our sustainability efforts. Our efforts are primarily fueled by our business needs — we can only be as sustainable as the communities we serve so we’ve initiated a host of programs and partnerships to help strengthen those communities while continuing to build our business.

We also have ethical drivers for our sustainability work. Across Coca-Cola, we are parents, partners, siblings, friends, concerned citizens — and we live in the communities where we operate. We have a responsibility to help others.

How has your organization gone about partnering both at the local level and at the national level to ensure that the social value you’re creating on the ground is recognized and supported with policies and governance?

We work with governments, civil society organizations, and other companies. It’s essential to invite the groups that influence policy and governance to be part of the initial conversations so they share ownership from the start. Plus these organizations often have valuable local intelligence and experience

Consider our work in Tanzania with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In 2010 we joined forces to improve access to critical medicines. Working with the Tanzania’s Medical Stores Department and others, we were able to share our supply chain expertise, reduce medicine bottlenecks, and improve distribution as a whole.  We try to use our expertise and know-how to make a positive difference in the communities we serve.

Looking at businesses and consumers of the future—10, 20, 30 years from now—what will happen to organizations that fail to integrate social and environmental concerns into the core of their daily operations?

In my opinion, the importance of balancing social and economic value will only grow over time and organizations that don’t do this will fail. They’ll lack the resiliency to address ever-changing consumer attitudes and shifts in geopolitics, economics, and demographics.

For Coca-Cola, many of the most exciting opportunities are likely to come from the intersection of sustainability and our supply chain, giving us new ways to reduce our packaging, energy, and water footprints and improve the well-being of the communities we serve. While we’ve gained some good momentum with initiatives like 5by20, EKOCENTER and PlantBottle, we know we’re just getting started. Sustainability is an ongoing journey, one that we hope and trust will build forward momentum as we remain “constructively discontent.”

What do you mean by “constructively discontent”?

It’s my way of recognizing achievement but also understanding that we can never be satisfied with it. We must refuse to accept the status quo and continue to challenge ourselves. We have to keep setting higher goals and expectations and then meet or exceed them. And at the end of the day, we need to operate with a lens of optimism, but temper it with a lens of reality.

This is part of an ongoing series from Harvard Business Review and the Skoll World Forum on how mega-corporations are integrating innovative ways to solve social and environmental problems into their core operations.

The ‘tech effect’ on philanthropy. The dotcom boom injected a huge dose of entrepreneurship into the world of philanthropy, and gave rise to the term ‘venture philanthropy’ based on the idea that Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs would transfer their creative skills to the foundations they were setting up. An increasingly business like vocabulary has grown around the sector, reflecting the goal to maximise the impact of wealth. Today, the best foundations are increasingly businesslike. They are “strategic” and “market conscious”, “impact oriented”, “knowledge based”, “high engagement” and always looking to maximise “leverage” of donor money explain Bishop and Green. 

Their task as they see it is not about handing out money, but of forging alliances and building networks: with government and industry, or among groups of charities. The Gates Foundation’s partnership with ‘Big Pharma’ is one example of the strategising behind today’s philanthropic ventures. Since 2000 The Gates Foundation has worked with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) on preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS and Malaria – a partnership, which has produced a promising malaria drug for infants by switching the focus of GSK’s top scientists from research objectives with short-term commercial gain to global health issues. The birth of social entrepreneurship and giving the Ebay way.

Bishop and Green describe the philanthropic statement that Pierre Omidyar founder of Ebay and his first employee Jeff Skoll made in 1998. It was on trend mirroring the risky business of tech, and it was edgy. They strolled into Silicon Valley Community Foundation and made an offer of a $1 million block of shares. Their one condition was that the foundation keep the shares for a year, a term that many others rejected. A year later the foundation sold its shares and banked $40 million. They were either very sure of themselves, or habitual risk-takers. 

Bishop and Green call giving the Ebay way a feat of generosity as they had not yet banked anything themselves. Soon after, Skoll was drawn swiftly and sharply into the world of social entrepreneurship, where people were building businesses to tackle social problems. The blend of ambition to create change powered by entrepreneurial skills held Skoll’s attention and mobilised his resources. He created the Skoll Foundation, endowed the Oxford Said Business school to set up the Skoll Centre for Entrepreneurship and began hosting the annual Skoll World Forum. Each year the Skoll Foundation awards $1.25 million over three years to social enterprises on the verge of growth significant enough to create better futures for millions.

Social enterprise also emerged as the perfect match for the money of the business-minded philanthropist, Pierre Omidyar who went on to found the Omidyar Network, and began investing in micro-finance and for profit social businesses including IGNIA a Mexican venture capital firm and Meetup.com, a platform bringing together communities based on shared interests. Today social enterprise is increasingly gaining support from venture philanthropists like Skoll and Omidyar, and engaging with investors with both social and financial goals.

Social investment and tax reliefs.  

Social investment is investment with a philanthropic twist. It is a phenomenum gradually funnelling capital towards social causes as social investors look for opportunities to use their investments for the broader benefits of society. Simply put the social investor looks for both social and financial returns on their investments. Most often this comes from investing in social ventures. There are increasing numbers of firms with this mandate, including Bridges Ventures, the Social Investment Business and Big Issue Invest who all back social ventures.

There are also organisations like ClearlySo, which connects social businesses and enterprises with investors. And, with a new social investment tax relief in the UK social investment is increasingly visible to mainstream investors. For Sir Ronald Cohen this is the tech effect continued, a natural progression from venture capitalism. Sir Ronald made his own private fortune investing in tech enterprises, and is widely credited as the father of social investment.

After co-founding social finance firms Bridges Ventures, and Social Finance UK he recently became chair of the G8 Social Investment Taskforce, which is looking to integrate social investment into the mainstream economy. Cohen is a strong advocate for linking social and financial return, and sees social enterprise as the wave that will follow the tech explosion. The age of the ‘social good network’. A century on from Carnegie’s essay, and hot on the heels of the tech effect and the birth of social investment a growing number of social good networks and conferences have emerged. There is already a lengthy conference circuit where individuals can connect their finance and business skills to social causes.

There’s the Global Philanthropy Forum in the US, a network of high-net-worth individuals committed to advancing international causes through their giving, investing, and policy voice. And, just a few of the popular conferences on the global circuit include the Skoll World Forum, the UK’s annual social investment conference Good Deals, the GIIN investor forum and Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) a gathering of individuals and organisations dedicated to directing market systems to social impact.

And now for the first time in the UK a six month leadership programme is being launched inviting international wealth holders and inheritors, entrepreneurs, investors and pioneering individuals to learn, connect and act with like-minded others. The Pioneers for Change Leadership Programme is designed to inspire, equip, connect and support leaders who want to explore and elevate their potential for positive impact. Continuing the Carnegie legacy and in keeping with the Sillicon Valley brand of philanthropy, the programme aims to ignite a revolution, and foster international leadership in philanthropy, social investment and entrepreneurship.

These different influences are shaping today’s approaches to philanthropy in the midst of a wealth transfer of gargantuan proportions. Years of accumulated wealth—in Europe and America—are about to change hands, as the post-war generation dies off. One estimate from a study in America, by Paul Schervish and John Havens of Boston College puts the size of the transfer likely to occur in the US between 1998 and 2052 as somewhere between $41 trillion and $136 trillion. There is an enormous amount of money available, and as an entrepreneurial culture takes root in the world of philanthropy, these may well be the boom years of philanthrocapitalism. 

The original article appeared on Pioneerspost.com. Pioneers Post is the media partner for the Pioneers for Change Leadership Programme delivered by Adessy Associates. This article is from a series of monthly articles exploring the changing world of philanthropy.