By Pedro Tarak, co-founder of Sistema B and RITA (Regional Impact Trade Alliance).
In the first decades of this century, a movement of businesses redefining the meaning of success began to gain momentum—and, with it, a new understanding of the role of business in society. Rather than measuring success solely in terms of profit, these businesses seek to create social and environmental solutions through the products and services they offer. They aim to make what they bring to market a response to a social or environmental problem. We broadly refer to them as impact businesses. For them, sustainability becomes a condition for doing business and a driver of transformation through the market.
The emergence of this movement can be understood as a response to the profound changes of our time. On the one hand, we live in a context of growing inequality. When I began this journey, we spoke of 1% of the population holding more than half of the world’s wealth. Today, that wealth is concentrated in even smaller groups. On the other hand, we face a climate crisis marked by biodiversity loss and ecosystem imbalances. These processes are not new, but human activity has accelerated them over the past ten years. Against this backdrop, more and more people recognize that they cannot stand on the sidelines and seek ways to help address social and environmental problems from wherever they are. Impact businesses are part of that search. Their intended positive impact forms part of their value proposition and becomes a new source of competitive advantage in society and in their markets.
Within this landscape, one of the best-known and most widespread movements is the B Corp movement, which brings together more than 11,000 companies worldwide and 330 in Argentina, although it is not the only expression of this new approach to business. One of the most common mistakes is to reduce its proposition to a certification comparable to the various ISO certifications for processes or products. In this case, the certification applies to the business as an organization. It enables companies to measure social, environmental, and governance impacts across different areas and have their materiality independently verified. It also entails legal changes to their governing documents, commitments, and transparent reporting on those impacts. But the B Corp movement seeks a broader transformation: to develop a new business sector that redefines success, moving from profit as the sole objective to the creation of integrated value—economic, social, and environmental—with short- and long-term impacts, from the local to the global level. At the same time, certification makes each B Corp part of a global business community that aspires to be among “the best for the world,” not just “the best in the world.” In this way, purposes rooted in the common good take shape through businesses and the market.
Whatever forms or certifications impact businesses may adopt, the central challenge is to translate purpose into a business model capable of sustaining transformation over time. This requires, on the one hand, moving away from seeing sustainability as a cost and beginning to understand it as an investment, with returns across economic, social, and environmental dimensions and a longer-term perspective. Transforming the business model can improve efficiency, productivity, and company valuation, strengthen resilience, and attract talent and capabilities that broaden the company’s horizons. On the other hand, it also requires recognizing that a worthwhile purpose does not guarantee success. An impact business is still a business: like any other, it needs a good product, must learn how to sell, and has to find real demand in the market.
The key, then, is to align a company’s commitment to change with a social or environmental need and concrete market demand for solutions. Where these meet, sustainability becomes part of the core business, and purpose takes shape as a solution that can sustain itself and grow. The market becomes more than a condition for viability; it also becomes a dynamic force for extending the reach of transformation, ensuring that profit serves as a performance indicator and a tool for meeting the needs of different stakeholders, including shareholders. The company, in turn, expresses and communicates that purpose through the products and services it offers.
As this alignment extends across sectors, what is at stake is no longer simply the viability of each business, but the direction of a broader economic transition. That transition is already evident, for example, in the shift toward a circular economy, a new energy mix, and regenerative agriculture and livestock farming. In some cases, it is also reflected in international expansion driven by impact as a distinctive strategy for diversifying markets.
The scale and complexity of these processes also reveal the limits of individual action. No company alone possesses all the knowledge, resources, and capabilities needed to advance purposes that serve the common good. The challenge, then, extends beyond creating solutions within each organization to building value chains within ecosystems that connect businesses and producers, governments, investors, universities, organizations, and citizens—and enable knowledge, needs, solutions, trust, capital, and opportunities to circulate.
At the FIXIT 2026 gathering, I saw this ecosystem-building in action. The working groups brought together people from different sectors who connected not only through their industries, but also through a shared vision and commitment to impact. Sharing challenges, experiences, and capabilities created a sense of connection that allowed participants to recognize themselves as part of the same transition. For me, FIXIT’s value lies in its role as a convener, working to make these connections possible and strategically creating the conditions for people, knowledge, experience, capabilities, and capital to come together in interdependent relationships to co-create value. It is at these intersections that cells cease to be isolated and begin to form tissue. Three principles can guide us in reflecting on how we engage in conversation: valuing being together more than agreeing on everything; recognizing the power of sharing over persuading; and making a serious commitment to the quality and warmth of conversation. In a world marked by polarization and division, recovering our ability to come together and build is also part of the transition. No one can save themselves alone. We prosper and flourish through the fabric of our connections, within ecosystems.