SK Innovation has been supporting social ventures and enterprises through multiple programs. Lately, the company successfully organized an event called “SV Community Workshop” to strengthen the social enterprises and social ventures fostered by the company, receiving great responses from the participants. The workshop started on June 1^st and ended on July 1^st, after one month of various on and offline activities

The SV Community began January last year as a quarterly event with the goal to sustain reciprocally opened communication between SK Innovation and its partner social enterprises/ventures and achieve mutual development with collective intelligence among them. Despite the fact that the pandemic has impeded the event from being held off-line in large scale, the participants have still been been keeping in touch with one another through on-line channels such as Naver Band. There they shared their mutual needs against difficulties in management, including HR, labor service, Intellectual Property (IP), impact investment, etc. The SV Community Workshop is an event that is held partly online (non-contact) and partly off-line in small groups.

This quarter’s SV Community Workshop was hosted by Joyful Union, which had held the “Environmental Social Business Contest’ with SK Innovation. The curriculum was designed with the subject of impact investment by Impact Square, a specialist in consulting and education, divided into two sessions: a training session and a 1:1 mentoring session.

SK Innovation’s social enterprises nurturing strategy is developing from merely supporting in initial stage to fostering and investing stage, building a firm and expanded roadmap. Especially, it is evolving to a partnership based on communication and cooperation through opened community to share know-hows and help upgrade business models using collective intelligence.

Such strategy was also emphasized as a crucial factor for social enterprises to develop in a conference held by the Academy of Social Enterprise last April, where the study of “Analysis of Success Factor for SK Innovation’s Social Enterprise Stars” was introduced.

SK Innovation has been been supporting each company to secure competitiveness by supporting with tangible and intangible assets and sharing infrastructure. Also, SK Innovation is leading to build an ESG management model that generates social value in environmental field through win-win cooperation with social businesses.

As it had been so last year, this year’s SV Community Workshop was also held for social enterprise stars, environmental social business contest winners, and SV² Impact Partnering* companies.

(*) SV² Impact Partnering: a newly invented management term, meaning to generate square of the social value (SV) in cooperation of social ventures (SV).

In particular, this year’s SV Community Workshop consisted with a training session for attraction of impact investment and a mentoring session about investment consulting, receiving enthusiastic responses from the participating companies. Following the workshop held in January 2020, where each company shared its know-how, risk management measures, and legal knowledge, this year, investment-related education and mentoring were provided to help companies run their business.

▲ The first session of SV Community Workshop on June 1 (left). / Shin Min-jeong, CEO of Right Route attends the training session about impact investment during SV Community Workshop (right).

The first session of the SV Community Workshop on June 1 shared general understanding of impact investment and practical strategy to attract this kind of investment through on-line channel with a video conference platform, particularly focusing on the strategy for IR (Investor Relations) and composition of the IR pitching decks. On that day, CEOs and other staffs of total 18 social enterprises/social ventures, including Manglub, Somuna, Ingine, Inobus, Right Route, attended the session.

One of the attendees, Kim Min-soo, a manager of Manglub – the first social enterprise in Tra Vinh Province, Vietnam, said it was meaningful because he could think about methodologies for impact investment from various points of view. Another attendee, Kim Dae-hyeon, a Director of Social venture Ingine said he could get a great help from the last part of the session, which explained the measurement/report/assessment of investment in social value with practical examples, because his company was considering impact investment in the future.

▲ (Left photo) CEO Right Route Shin Min-jeong (right) attends the mentoring session about impact investment of SV Community Workshop /  (Right photo) CEO of Inobus Jang Jin-hyuk (right) attends the mentoring session about impact investment of SV Community Workshop

In the second round of the ‘SV Community Workshop’, customized guides for attracting investment were provided to address different investment needs for each company. From June 28 to July 1, the 1:1 mentoring was conducted both on-line and off-line. Social enterprises such as Usisan, Grape Lab and social ventures such as Somuna, O2M, Montsenu, Inobus, Right Route, etc attended the session.

CEO of Inobus Jang Jin-hyuk shared that it was very helpful to learn how how to differentiate his business from the others in the market and how to position his company’s brand in the future.

In the future, SK innovation plans to continue more diversified activities like the SV Community Workshop to strengthen the capabilities of social enterprises/social ventures.